Curious Objects

Latest Episodes:

How to Make a Modern Home (with Antiques), featuring Thomas Jayne Aug 25, 2021

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Time was, many top interior designers sought to conjure a perfectly seamless décor—whether it be all Louis XV furniture, all early American, or all modern. The results could be beautiful—but also somewhat boring, and certainly impersonal. Interior decorator Thomas Jayne suggests another way to put together the spaces we live in: by using creative combinations of striking art and objects from across time to derive a style that’s endlessly evocative, livable, and fresh. In this episode, Ben Miller gets the goods from Jayne on the history of interiors (from the Greeks to the present day); what to budget first; and the spirit of “democratic decoration,” that, historically, has animated American interiors.

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O'Keeffe on the Block Jul 28, 2021

Show notes

In mid-May, two paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe sold at auction, one in each of the world’s top sales rooms. Green Oak Leaves fetched $1.15 million at Sotheby’s, while Autumn Leaf with White Flower brought nearly $5 million at Christie’s. This month on our Curious Objects podcast, we bring you Reagan Upshaw—critic, dealer, appraiser, and all-around bon vivant—to expound on the lovely filaments, sepals, and stamens of O’Keeffe's oeuvre.

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The WPA Origins of the American Doll, with Allison Robinson Jun 29, 2021

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During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration funded an interracial labor program in Wisconsin that employed over five thousand women to craft handmade goods: the Milwaukee Handicraft Project. Especially noteworthy among the rugs, quilts, costumes, and books that the women produced is a run of exquisitely crafted and clothed toddler-sized dolls. Host Benjamin Miller learns from scholar Allison Robinson about how these dolls—made to represent different ethnic groups both foreign and domestic—provide insight into New Deal–era debates over women’s labor, race, and cultural nationalism . . . and into the origins of Barbie and American Girl.

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English Glass/Chinese Craft May 26, 2021

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The technique of reverse-painting was introduced to China in the late 1600s by its European trading partners, who manufactured and shipped the plate glass necessary for its production. By the middle of the following century artists specializing in producing images for foreign markets were well-established at China’s primary international port, Guangzhou, or Canton, as well as the capital of Beijing. In this episode, Corning Museum of Glass curator Christopher Maxwell introduces a superlative example of this transnational art. The circa 1784–1785 painting depicts a bullish scene on the Zhujiang River, with junks and sampans crowding the wharf in front of the famous “hongs” (warehouses) flying the flags of Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

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Bill Traylor on the Silver Screen, with filmmakers Sam Pollard and Jeffrey Wolf May 05, 2021

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In April of 1853 a child was born into slavery on an Alabama cotton plantation owned by George Traylor. His first name was Bill and he would take the plantation owner’s last name for himself. A sharecropper and laborer for most of his life, in the decades since his death in 1949 Bill Traylor has became known to the world as an artist. Now, a new documentary tells Bill Traylor’s story on film for the first time. Ben Miller speaks with executive producer Sam Pollard and director Jeffrey Wolf about "Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts," distributed by Kino Lorber and available in virtual theaters via Kino Marquee.

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Museums and the Lure of the Sell-Off, with the PMA's director and CEO Timothy Rub Apr 22, 2021

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The Association of Art Museum Directors killed something of a sacred cow last year when it ruled that museums will be permitted to use funds from deaccessioned artworks—previously strictly controlled—to pay for a wider array of institutional costs. On the occasion of this year’s virtual Philadelphia Show, Ben Miller speaks with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s director and CEO Timothy Rub about the AAMD’s ruling and ripple effects it might have throughout the museum world. In a wide-ranging conversation, which gets into the nitty gritty of collecting and deaccesioning habits and procedures, as well as fundraising niceties, Rub makes a strong case for continuing to keep the departments of museums—and their fundraising efforts—firmly separated.

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The Book of Hours: A Medieval Best-Seller Apr 14, 2021

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More popular than the Bible: that’s what the richly illustrated volumes known as books of hours—which helped worshipers keep track of each day’s seven canonical prayer periods—were during the Middle Ages. A trove of these objects from the Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg collection is up for sale on April 23 at Christie’s, and in this special episode of the podcast Ben and Christie’s specialist Eugenio Donadoni zoom in on a particularly opulent example illuminated by the mysterious Master of the Paris Bartholomeus Anglicus.

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Corot's Impressionist Lunchbox Mar 31, 2021

Show notes

Only nine times in his seventy-eight years did Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot paint on anything other than canvas, paper, and panel. On one occasion, offended by the crude wooden lunchbox carried by his friend Alfred Robaut, Corot had a new one constructed, which he decorated with a plein air painting, "Fraîcheurs matinales" ("Morning Freshness"). It’s a mini-masterpiece made all the more charming by its humble setting, a breezy landscape of trees and hills awash with sunlight and enlivened by one of Corot’s favorite motifs: a flash of red, the hat of a small figure coming over a rise. Host Ben Miller gets the story from the dealer who sold it, Jill Newhouse, and the collector who bought it, Ray Vickers.

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Five Hundred Years of American Craft, with Glenn Adamson Feb 24, 2021

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Glenn Adamson makes his second appearance on Curious Objects to discuss his new book, Craft: An American History. As his research shows, artisans from Paul Revere and Betsy Ross to Patrocino Barela and George Barris played a crucial and under-examined role in the formation of the United States’ national character. And what’s more, he tells us, the communal-slash-individual nature of craftwork could represent an antidote to the country’s current polarization.

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Blended Spirits: A Curious Objects Cocktail Hour at the Winter Show Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

From an early Renaissance list of statutes stipulating the amount of wine that every man, woman, and child of Bologna would receive daily, to a chunky twentieth-century cocktail ring, you’ll hear about wacky objects and the wild stories behind them from some of the Winter Show’s most irreverent dealers: Daniel Crouch (Daniel Crouch Rare Books), Carrie Imberman (Kentshire), and Keegan Goepfert (Les Enluminures).

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