Boston Athenæum

June 28, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. As a response to his desire to make a work of art, unique in character and materiality, Aaron Sinift created the Five-Year Plan project. The inspiration came from the artworks printed onto the side of sling bags called “jholas” that are commonly made by Gandhi ashram collectives throughout India. The cloth they are made from, called khadi, is made from hand-spun cotton thread woven on hand-looms, a cloth with deep resonance in India. Sinift commissioned 1.4 kilometers, almost a mile, of khadi from the Manav Seva Sannidhi Ashram in Modinagar, which employs 700 spinners, the majority of whom are women over the age of 55. The ashram also employs 45 weavers, and 35 helpers. Most of these workers are Dalit Muslim or low-caste Hindu, and are the sole providers for their families. The ashrams who created this book made it entirely from khadi cloth featuring screen- and block-printed artworks by 24 artists from 8 countries. He commissioned well-known artists like Francesco Cle

May 21, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Join us for a panel discussion that will explore exciting developments in the life sciences. The latest trends in gene therapy, gene editing, and RNA interference--to name a few subjects--will be examined. The panelists will also trace the journey of consumer and clinical products from the spark of an idea to product-testing in the lab. Other questions for discussion include: What are current trends in the life sciences and how can they be extended into the future? And what impact will those trends have on the greater Boston area? Come learn about this fascinating field and its impact on both an individual and societal level. Carl Zimmer, esteemed science writer for the New York Times, will serve as moderator for the panel comprised of three outstanding speakers: Nobel Laureate Dr. Craig C. Mello representing academic research, Dr. Adam Koppel of Bain Capital Life Science Ventures representing venture capital, and Dr. David Meeker of KSQ Therapeutics, formerly of Genzyme

May 7, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Poets are supposed to pour their souls into their work. In so doing, however, they often adopt masks, speaking through others. This cast of characters can be extremely varied: genders are switched, professions are tried on, contrary ideas rehearsed, Phillis Wheatley hangs out with Robinson Crusoe, Sacagawea headlines with Crazy Jane. This set of readings by actors from The Poets' Theatre, which ranges from Erica Funkhouser to Alfred Lord Tennyson to Richard Howard, from the Earl of Rochester to Elizabeth Bishop to Lloyd Schwartz, reveals poets in masquerade, ventriloquizing a wide array of extraordinary individuals, even pretending to be... versions of themselves.

May 22, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. The symmetrical, exuberant heart is everywhere: it gives shape to candy, pendants, the frothy milk on top of a cappuccino, and much else. How can we explain the ubiquity of what might be the most recognizable symbol in the world? In The Amorous Heart, Marilyn Yalom tracks the heart metaphor and heart iconography across two thousand years, through Christian theology, pagan love poetry, medieval painting, Shakespearean drama, Enlightenment science, and into the present. She argues that the symbol reveals a tension between love as romantic and sexual on the one hand, and as religious and spiritual on the other. Ultimately, the heart symbol is a guide to the astonishing variety of human affections, from the erotic to the chaste and from the unrequited to the conjugal.

May 8, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Lucas Cowan, Public Art Curator for The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, will present on The Greenway's 2018 Public Art Curatorial theme titled GLOW, a public exhibition of commissioned light-based artworks, historically significant Massachusetts light based roadside architecture, and interactive experiences that showcases the rapidly evolving concept of light and art, helping to shape our sense of place, and our collective and individual identities. With the 2018 exhibition GLOW, spectators will have the opportunity to interact with the The Greenway in the evenings and see how the public will actually use the park after dark. The project centers on the exhibition of 8 large scale historic neon signs from local businesses c.1914-1965 that once existed throughout Massachusetts. The exhibition of the historical neon signs also presents a tremendous opportunity to engage new audiences who are interested in 20th century popular culture. Furthermore, the exhibition represent

May 17, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Joseph Leo Koerner pays tribute to the enigmatic artistry of Hieronymus Bosch. Active in the Netherlands around 1500, at the eve of the Protestant Reformation, Bosch was a master-portraitist of devils, nightmares, cosmic catastrophes, and hellish punishments. In cultivating evil as his strange artistic specialty, Bosch also cast himself as potentially demonic, a painter of enemies who might also be an enemy painter. A person of his time, Bosch nevertheless has relevance today, in our era of increased xenophobia and polarized politics. An absorbing study of the dark paradoxes of human creativity, Bosch and Bruegel is also a timely account of how hatred can be converted into tolerance through the agency of art. It takes readers through all the major paintings, drawings, and prints of these two unforgettable artists ― including Bosch’s notoriously elusive Garden of Earthly Delights, which forms the core of this historical tour de force.

May 10, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Every day, Americans make decisions about their privacy: what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become a central task of citizenship. How did privacy come to loom so large in American life? Sarah Igo tracks this elusive social value across the twentieth century, as individuals questioned how they would, and should, be known by their own society. Popular journalism and communication technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and workplace testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all propelled privacy to the foreground of U.S. culture. Jurists and philosophers but also ordinary people weighed the perils, the possibilities, and the promise of being known. In the process, they redrew the borders of contemporary selfhood and citizenship. The Known Citizen reveals how privacy became the indispensable language f

November 29, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. If you eat food, you need bees. The world’s bees can create economic and ecological sustainability, if only we let them. As pollinators, bees bring us over 100 fruit and vegetable crops and provide feed for our livestock industry. Yet bees are dying at an alarming rate. Data from urban environments indicate that bees are doing better in cities. Why is this? Learn how to get involved in urban beekeeping, and how to save these vitally important creatures.

April 26, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Before and after World War II, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity—between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, unions and collective bargaining were legalized. Glass-Steagall reined in speculative finance. At Bretton Woods, a global financial system was devised explicitly to allow nations to manage capitalism. Yet this golden era turned out to be lightning in a bottle. From the 1970s on, a power shift occurred, in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened, and disheartened voters turned to far-right, faux populism. Robert Kuttner lays out the events that led to the postwar miracle, and charts its dissolution all the way to Trump, Brexit, and the tenuous state of the EU. Is today’s poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultra-nationalism inevitable? Or can democracy find a way to survive?

April 17, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Redemption is an intimate look at the last thirty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes of King's life. King was exhausted from a brutal speaking schedule. He was being denounced in the press and by political leaders as an agent of violence. He was facing dissent even within the civil rights movement and among his own staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In Memphis, a federal court injunction was barring him from marching. As threats against King mounted, he feared an imminent, violent death. The risks were enormous, the pressure intense. Drawing on dozens of interviews by the author with people who were immersed in the Memphis events, Redemption features recently released documents from Atlanta archives, and includes compelling photos. The fresh material reveals untold facets of the story including a never-before-reported lapse by the Memphis Police Department to provide security for King. It unveils financial and logistical dilemmas and recounts the em

March 29, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In 1899, Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired the first Fra Angelico painting in America. The exhibition Heaven on Earth at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum reunites for the first time the founder's magnificent Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin with its three companions from the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Conceived as a set of jewel-like reliquaries between 1424 and 1434 for one of the most important churches in Florence, they tell the story of the Virgin Mary’s life. This lecture explores how a Dominican friar in Renaissance Florence transformed the history of western art with breathtaking paintings of peerless originality. Immerse yourself in the material splendor of his craftsmanship and enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations for this exhibition. Renaissance master Fra Angelico (c. 1400-1455) transformed the history of western art with his breathtaking paintings. Heaven on Earth reunites for the first time the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s ma

March 27, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views." One need not deny that the Framers had good intentions in order to believe that they also had interests. Ultimately, both the Constitution's content and its ratification process raise troubling questions about democratic legitimacy. The Federalists were eager to avoid full-fledged democratic deliberation over the Constitution, and the document that was ratified was stacked in favor of their preferences. And in terms of substance, the Constitution was a significant departure from the more democratic state constitutions of the 1770s. Definitive and authoritative, The Framers' Coup explains why the Framers preferred such a constitution and how the

March 8, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In April 2012, when transgender issues had yet to break onto the national scene, Sarah McBride made headlines—and history—when she came out publicly as a transgender woman while serving as American University’s student body president. With a viral Facebook post that announced her identity, she suddenly found herself on the forefront of a movement, fighting for positive change. Since that day in April, Sarah has continued to make history, eventually becoming the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention. Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how mu

March 5, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. No member of America's Founding Generation had a greater impact on the Constitution and the Supreme Court than John Marshall, and no one did more to preserve the delicate unity of the fledgling United States. From the nation's founding in 1776 and for the next forty years, Marshall was at the center of every political battle. As Chief Justice of the United States - the longest-serving in history - he established the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of the federal Constitution and courts. As the leading Federalist in Virginia, he rivaled his cousin Thomas Jefferson in influence. As a diplomat and secretary of state, he defended American sovereignty against France and Britain, counseled President John Adams, and supervised the construction of the city of Washington. D.C. This is the astonishing true story of how a rough-cut frontiersman - born in Virginia in 1755 and with little formal education - invented himself as one of the nation's preeminent lawyers a

February 28, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler’s war machine, through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, William Fairbairn, was a portly pensioner with an unusual passion: he was the world’s leading expert in silent killing, hired to train the guerrillas being parachuted behind enemy lines. Another, Cecil Clarke, was an engineer and caravan-designer turned maverick bomb-maker. Led by dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins, these men—along with three others—formed a secret inner circle that, aided by a group of formidable ladies, changed the course of the Second World War: a cohort hand-picked by Winston Churchill, whom he called his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

February 15, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In his 1931 book The Epic of America James Truslow Adams first popularized the concept of the “American Dream" as "being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations." But the meaning of the term changes through time as culture changes, and as opportunists try to redefine to their own advantage. It is this dream which he thought "lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores." But he also thought that, even in 1931, many were losing sight of this dream. The situation has worsened since he wrote. Now the American Dream is most often equated with the dream of owning a spacious home. In the United States, the new values affect major government decisions on housing, regulation, and mortgage guarantees. Conflating the American Dream with expensive housing has had dangerous consequences—it may have even contributed to the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

February 13, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In “The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History”, Martin Puchner tells the story of literature and its power to shape people, civilizations, and world history by exploring sixteen selected key stories from over 4,000 years of world literature. Beginning with the Iliad's influence on Alexander the Great to J. K. Rowling today, Martin Puncher takes us on a remarkable journey through history, as he tells stories of people whose lives and beliefs led them to create groundbreaking texts that affected the world they were born into, and the world in which we live today. Along the way, we learn fascinating facts and insights about people—how Gutenberg paved the way for Luther, Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering work as a media entrepreneur, Goethe’s invention of world literature in Sicily, and Akhmatova’s and Solzhenitsyn’s secret writings in the Soviet Union. Throughout The Written World, Martin Puchner captures the inventions—writing technologies, the pr

February 7, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. For two centuries the members and proprietors of the Boston Athenæum have pooled their resources, interests, and expertise to create an extraordinary shared collection of rare books. From a hand-colored copy of the monumental 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle to the imaginative sculptural structures of contemporary book artist Julie Chen, the books in the Athenæum's collection are available to each and every member, as well as to a broader community of scholars, learners, and book-lovers. Incoming Curator of Rare Books and Head of Special Collections Dr. John A. Buchtel explores what it means for an athenæum to continue collecting, cataloging, preserving, and providing access to physical books in our increasingly digital age. Books, he argues, convey a range of meaning, emotional and aesthetic power, and historical connectedness that extends far beyond their texts. Drawing on examples he has encountered during two decades in the field, Buchtel meditates on the human presence

February 6, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In this richly illustrated talk, Georgia Barnhill sheds fresh light on the beloved American luminist painter and printmaker Fitz Henry Lane, the subject of her current exhibition, Drawn from Nature & On Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane at the Cape Ann Museum. Barnhill, curator emerita of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society, considers Lane’s work within the context of his contemporaries, Benjamin Chimney, Robert Cooke, Benjamin F. Nutting, Robert Salmon, David Claypoole Johnston—among others and explores his deep association with the Boston Athenæum, where the artist first exhibited in 1841.

January 29, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. An enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—including those in government, business, education, and the arts—Forged in Crisis, by celebrated Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson. What do such disparate figures have in common? Why do their extraordinary stories continue to amaze and inspire? In delivering the answers to those questions, Nancy Koehn offers a remarkable template by which to judge those in our own time to whom the public has given its trust.