Scholar Torren Gatson, guest editor for the current edition of the MESDA Journal, comes on the pod to talk about an iron fireback (a metal plate protecting the back wall of a fireplace) produced at the Vesuvius Furnace in Lincoln County, North Carolina. Established by revolutionary war veteran Joseph Graham, the furnace depended on slave labor—oftentimes quite skilled—as well as that of freedmen and white women. Gatson’s research paints a compelling picture of the unique work culture this state ...
Aug 25, 2020•46 min
According to some, underneath our feet is a second, inverted world, home to strange beasts, the Lost Tribes of Israel . . . maybe even Hitler. In the nineteenth century, a booster for this “hollow earth” theory was one John Cleves Symmes of Sussex County, New Jersey. Accompanied by a perforated wooden globe, between 1818 and 1827 Symmes crisscrossed the United States delivering lectures on the existence of portals to this “underworld” located at the poles, and urging an expedition be undertaken ...
Jul 28, 2020•33 min
This month, Ben speaks with Tiffany Momon, visiting assistant professor at Sewanee University in Tennessee, and founder of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, a scholarly resource that explores the contributions that African Americans have made to the material culture of the United States. Tiffany and Ben focus their attention on a chair made by enslaved craftsmen at Leonidas Polk’s Leighton Plantation in Louisiana, and Tiffany offers tips on what institutions and researchers can do to ensur...
Jun 28, 2020•52 min
In 1834 a law was passed in South Carolina that prohibited slaves from reading or writing. The punishment for transgressors? Fifty lashes. That same year, Dave Drake, an enslaved potter at work in Edgefield County inscribed his first poem on a large stoneware jug he'd made. In this episode of the podcast, Ethan Lasser, chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells Dave’s story and that of an 1857 storage jar that bears the epigrammatic lines: "I made this Jar for Cash-/ though its called lucre...
May 27, 2020•39 min
It's kinetic sculpture, it's haute couture, it’s . . . armor! This month, Ben speaks with Chassica Kirchhoff, an assistant curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, about a suite of metal suits from the 1500s that were worn and jousted in by the dukes of Saxony. Emblematic of the feisty Protestant state’s chivalric past and supreme examples of Saxon metalworking prowess, by the 1700s the suits of armor had come to represent “a fulcrum between the early modern past and the Enlightenment present,”...
Apr 29, 2020•47 min
Art historian Isabelle Kent regales Ben with the tale of five stained-glass roundels gracing the windows of her childhood home in London's Bedford Park, and he tells her all about his pair of telescoping Sheffield plate candelabra. Bonus tidbit: tips on how to distinguish between a bogus antique and the genuine item. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 23, 2020•53 min
Ben and Michael, like everyone else, are stuck at home, but they aren’t a pair to shrink from silver linings. For them these include the opportunity to spend time among the beautiful things they've acquired over the years: silver candlesticks, German watercolors, maps, and portrait miniatures. And they’ve got a fate-tempting prediction for the future: “A lot of people are going to come out of this crisis thinking, ‘God, I wish my walls weren’t so white . . . or bare.’” Learn more about your ad c...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr
Having spent his entire life in and around the antiques trade, dealer David Schorsch has seen it all. In this special episode, he talks with Michael about how the likes of Albert and Harold Sack, Florene Maine, and Ben and Cora Ginsburg weathered the Great Depression, and how this time around, “the Internet could very well be the thing that saves the antiques business.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 28, 2020•17 min
This month, Ben and Michael speak with Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of prints and drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum. The focus is an odd bronze bust of a crying child—once believed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo—but the trio’s conversation quickly branches out, touching on subjects as diverse as the collector/connoisseur divide in the 19th century; the role of “creative restorers” in the history of antique fakery; and the intercontinental flow of fine and dec arts treasures from Eu...
Mar 25, 2020•59 min
We’re pushing out a series of new episodes that will examine the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the antiques world. First up, Tim Martin of S. J. Shrubsole. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of stories told by plague-stricken raconteurs in fourteenth-century Italy, Martin decided to publish anecdotes from the curious lore of precious silver, keyed to objects that have passed through his shop, online. In this episode, Martin reads one of those stories, “The Customer is Al...
Mar 21, 2020•15 min
Join us on a journey to ancient Egypt as we explore the quirky material history and dead-serious religious significance of a very curious object: a 2,500-year-old Imsety-headed canopic jar—i.e., a vessel made to hold a mummy’s liver. Charis Tyndall of UK antiquities dealer Charles Ede guest stars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 28, 2020•46 min
Special guests James Boening (James Robinson, Inc.), Ria Murray (Lillian Nassau), and Taylor Thistlethwaite (Thistlethwaite Americana), join hosts Ben and Michael at the Park Avenue Armory during the Winter Show for a lively discussion about a Tiffany favrile glass pig, a silver molinet, a pair of Scottish Highlands pistols, a c. 1770 New York card table, and a fetching portrait miniature from the German school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Jan 31, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Ever wondered how the otherwise-unremarkable locales of Meissen, Staffordshire, and Sèvres became Europe's porcelain-producing polestars? Or what outsider artists like Bill Traylor and William Edmondson, discovered by the art establishment in the 1930s and ‘40s, made of their newfound fame? The experts at Christie's have the answers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 15, 2020•57 min
Michael Diaz-Griffith treks to Colonial Williamsburg to talk with chief curator Ron Hurst about a new exhibition, "British Masterworks," in which objects like gilded chandeliers, a colossal Chippendale bookcase, and an armchair upholstered with a parrot and a basket of fruit—collected by curators in the early twentieth century to flesh out their conception of 1700s Williamsburg—tell very different stories today from the ones they were bought to support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...
Dec 17, 2019•1 hr 4 min
The first American flag Peter Keim collected was a hand-sewn thirteen-star specimen that he found poking out of a paper bag at a farm sale. Happily for Keim, the flag turned out to be a hand-sewn beaut from 1862, worth $10,000. Keim now owns approximately four hundred American flags. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 20, 2019•54 min
Only a small number of people have the resources and wherewithal to collect Hepplewhite furniture or Paul Revere silver, but plenty collect baseball cards, including our guest this month: Randall, the voice behind the viral video The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 29, 2019•48 min
There’s a tried and true method for curating art exhibitions: paint walls, hang pictures, write labels, and Bob's your uncle. But what happens when a neuroscientist gets involved? This month, CO examines how researchers at the Peabody Essex Museum are analyzing the ways people look at art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 27, 2019•49 min
A suite of furniture made for the storied Beekman family of New York has one extremely over-the-top feature: the pieces are upholstered with export-quality French tapestries, i.e., material that wasn’t good enough for the French to hold on to. One man's trash . . . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 30, 2019•49 min
Philip Hewat-Jaboor is chairman of Masterpiece London and owner of a fine alabaster and rosso antico marble vase. The vase has a fascinating transnational backstory, but, maybe more importantly, it's beautiful, a factor Philip says is “coming back into the equation” with regard to works of art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 25, 2019•51 min
If you find an Old Master artwork in your attic, how can you be sure it isn’t fake? This month Ben and Michael consider the case of "Judith and Holofernes," a painting attributed to Caravaggio and estimated at $100–$150 million that sold to a private buyer on June 25. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 26, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Scholar and curator Glenn Adamson reminds us how important it is to pay attention to the objects in our immediate proximity in this episode keyed to Art Carpenter’s Wishbone chair Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 07, 2019•43 min
This month we focus on a quartet of curious objects at Freeman’s auction house: a marble-top pier table long believed to have belonged to General Washington’s aide-de-camp Tench Tilghman, a quirky painting of Noah’s Ark by foppish Lancaster polymath John Landis, and two stoneware wine bottles in the shape of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 29, 2019•29 min
In collector Noah Wunsch's private life one rule guides his hand: “no matter what you're buying make sure you like it.“ In this episode, Ben takes the measure of Noah’s treasure, which ranges from a 60 BC Visigothic belt buckle to the zany artwork of Genieve Figgis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 29, 2019•46 min
Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize in economics and his personal dog-eared copy of The Wealth of Nations have come up for auction at Sotheby’s. Ben Miller calls on the expertise of Duke University professor Bruce Caldwell and Sotheby’s specialist Gabriel Heaton to put these and other items in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 05, 2019•32 min
For the Winter Show’s 2019 diamond jubilee, Curious Objects hosted a panel discussion between four young lights of the antiques world, who'd gathered to announce the birth of a new club: the New Antiquarians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 31, 2019•55 min
Ben Miller talks to John Stuart Gordon about glass formed by the Trinity nuclear test and a stained-glass window smashed by a dining hall worker in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 30, 2018•47 min
Rare book dealers Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney drop some knowledge about Henry Highland Garnet’s "Memorial Discourse,” the first address delivered to Congress by an African-American. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 04, 2018•54 min
Happy birthday, Curious Objects! In this special anniversary episode, we take a look back at the work we’ve done these last twelve months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 01, 2018•50 min
A virtual tour of the suite of Gilded Age mansions built for the Vanderbilts, Oelrichs, Astors, and Berwinds in Newport, Rhode Island, by the likes of Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 29, 2018•33 min
This time it's your turn. For the last two months, we’ve been asking listeners to post their curious objects on Instagram, tagging #mycuriousobject and @antiquesmag. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 27, 2018•30 min
