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Postponed – Mary Lesneski Memorial Lecture and Reception
April 23, 2020 at 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM
This event was temporarily postponed. We will be sure to post the new date and time when it is confirmed.
Art and Reform: The Saturday Evening Girls
The Saturday Evening Girls take center stage at this year’s annual Mary Lesneski Memorial Lecture and Reception. Young immigrant women, living in the tenements of the North End in early 20th century Boston, gathered weekly to create colorful and often lyrical ceramics under the enterprise Paul Revere Pottery. The wares were sold to fund the young women’s informal education, at a time when there was a void in social and educational opportunities for girls. The pieces produced by Paul Revere Pottery are now extremely valuable and cherished by Museums and private collectors across the country. Hear about the women who, inspired by the patriot and entrepreneur, took Paul Revere’s legend into their own hands – literally – and formed ceramic wares appreciated for posterity.
Nonie Gadsden is the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). She earned her B.A. from Yale College and her M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware. Prior to joining the MFA in 2004, she worked at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. At the MFA, Gadsden is responsible for a wide range of artwork, including the planning and installation of the MFA’s award-winning Art of the Americas Wing (opened 2010). Gadsden curated many exhibitions in the MFA, including the current exhibition “Women Take the Floor” (2019). She is the author of books, essays, articles, and book reviews including the monograph Art and Reform: Sara Galner, the Saturday Evening Girls and the Paul Revere Pottery (2006). She heads the Collections Committee of the Nichols House Museum on Boston’s Beacon Hill, serves as a Governor for the Decorative Arts Trust, and is a member of the Council of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
The lecture will be held in the Franklin Lyceum in the Rasmussen Education Center. Reception to follow in Brooke Hall with an opportunity to visit Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere and His Ride with Concord Museum Curator, David Wood.
$10 Member | $15 Non-Member. Reception to follow.