Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on our Curious Objects podcast, host Benjamin Miller is joined by Marina Wells to discuss scrimshaw. Whalebone, teeth, and other products of the sea adorned with nautical scenes and remembrances of home, scrimshaw is a portal into the lives and daydreams of whalers confined for months at a time aboard bobbing, blood-and-blubber-spattered boats. Under discussion in this episode are a pair of sperm whale teeth bearing depictions of what look like female pirates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Ben is joined by Dan Rubinstein, design journalist and host of the Grand Tourist podcast, to discuss TRENDS. But first of all . . . do they even exist anymore? Or are we living in a post-trend world ruled by the math of the algorithm and the magnetism of sui generis celebrities? Ben and Dan consider trends through historical and pop-cultural lenses, using a very curious object as the jumping-off point: a pewter brooch in the shape of a Norse shield designed by Jorgen Jensen, son of Scandinavia’s trendiest modern silver maker Georg Jensen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Part 2 of a special two-part podcast, host Benjamin Miller speaks again with Peter Siebert, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum, this time about a Revolutionary War–era naval signal book made for English Admiral Richard Howe. “Prepare to haul to the wind together on the starboard tack when in order of battle, and the ships are to haul to the wind forthwith when the admiral fires a third gun” and other such recondite orders fill this hand-printed and watercolored volume, belying its usefulness as an eminently modern tool of warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Part 1 of a special two-part podcast, Curious Objects’ host Benjamin Miller speaks with Peter Siebert, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum about a folk art watercolor from the late 1700s that’s been the subject of a major research project. Called Navigation Lesson, the painting is believed to depict the artist, Cornelius van Buskirk, receiving instruction from Commodore John Barry (1745-1803), the man regarded as the father of the United States Navy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s episode, Ben Miller speaks with Elena Kanagy-Loux, lacewear trendsetter and co-founder of the Brooklyn Lace Guild. The focus object is a seventeenth-century Italian handkerchief, but Ben’s and Elena’s conversation also touches on that time she worked for Courtney Love; good (and bad) representations of lace and lace production in cinema; and Refashioning the Renaissance, a five-year project to investigate popular dress trends and meanings in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Romanov dynasty was wiped out in 1918 . . . but what happened to all their stuff? Well, some of it ended up at Heritage Auctions, whose Imperial Fabergé and Russian Works of Art auction on May 17 hopes to move a treasure trove of ikons, furniture pieces, diaries, and gold-encrusted baubles. To discuss the sale—and in particular a Fabergé bonbonnière given to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna—Ben Miller welcomes guest Nicholas Nicholson, specialist in Russian works of art at Heritage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the newest installment of our advice series, Ben Miller speaks with Jordan Heres, co-founder with his wife, Ingrid, of the Charlottesville, Virginia, rug purveyor Weft and Wool. The focus object is a rug from Karaja, Iran, made in about 1900, but Ben’s and Jordan also tackle such subjects as how often a rug should be washed, why you should never use a beater bar when vacuuming a rug, and where the best rugs can be found (spoiler: it’s Istanbul, but the runner-up might surprise listeners). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special throwback episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Ellery Foutch, assistant professor of American studies at Middlebury College, about a “relic Windsor chair” assembled by Henry Sheldon (founder of the Middlebury museum named in his honor) in 1884. This unique piece of furniture was built with fragments of wood salvaged from structures with local or national significance—such as the warship Old Ironsides, the William Penn House in Philadelphia, and a colonial whipping post. (Look here for a full list of the chair’s components.) And thanks to Foutch’s and her student’s efforts, the nineteenth-century chair now has a twentieth-century twin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Curious Objects Bites episode, Benjamin Miller examines an 1830s manuscript tune book from rural Vermont. Bound crudely in leather, this book of sacred music was made by a farmer named Bernard Ward as a gift for his grandson, and many years later passed into the major collection of musical instruments, books, scores, and ephemera assembled by Frederick R. Selch. Filling Ben in on the details of this unusual item is Brenton Grom, executive director of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum in Connecticut. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Romney, co-founder of rare book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a frequent guest on Pawn Stars, returns to our podcast Curious Objects this week. She has with her a mid-nineteenth-century abecebestiary, or calligraphic treatment of the alphabet with animal motifs, made by Englishman Charles Eduard Stuart . . . except that wasn't really his name. Charles Manning Allen and his brother John, known as the Sobieski Stuarts, were eccentric book publishers who claimed to be descendants of Stuart claimant to the throne Bonnie Prince Charlie. Volumes produced by the pair such as Romney’s abecedary, what she describes as “Book of Kells meets M. C. Escher meets Game of Thrones,” and bogus guides to Scottish tartans and clans found a ready audience in romantic Victorian England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Cerio, editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES, died Saturday. In this special episode, Ben pays tribute to the man who gave Curious Objects the green light, and who foresaw a rich future for objects from the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Glenn Adamson returns to the pod to discuss an exhibition he co-curated at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu focuses on the work of the Okinawan-American ceramicist, which bridges the gulf between art and craft. In this inaugural installment of Curious Objects Bites—bingeable conversations about fascinating things for the busy listener—Adamson details a “closed form”: a Takaezu pot that confines a bead that rattles around inside. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taylor Thistlethwaite, proprietor of Thistlethwaite Americana in Middleburg, Virginia, returns to the pod to defend the merits of “brown furniture.” Whether it’s earthy, richly figured black walnut or the sometimes-overlooked black cherry, it’s important not to “think of wood as just something brown,” Taylor says. “There’s so much life in it. And it matures like fine wine.” Case in point: Taylor’s three-hundred-year-old chest-of-drawers with chunky hardware and unusual feet that is as beautiful as it is rare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you ever start to feel like history is abstract, spend a little time with an object or two that were actually there. For instance, a silver bowl and a pair of candlesticks that once belonged to New York grandees Pieter and Elizabeth Delancey, which suddenly reappeared recently after being lost for three hundred years. In this special rerun of one of Curious Objects’ most popular episodes, host Benjamin Miller revisits the obscure journey made by these three storied objects, with the help of Debra Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, Tim Martin, owner of S. J. Shrubsole, and Delancey heirs Dan and Alice Ayers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month Benjamin Miller made a guest appearance on Art Slice, hosted by the podcasting power couple—and artists and art historians—Stephanie Dueñas and Russell Shoemaker, and now available here. The trio’s conversation focuses on a dazzling group of mixed-metal wares made by Tiffany and Company in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including such standouts as an 1879 chocolate pot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a coffee pot shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Of special interest is the former object’s patinated copper elements, produced by an alchemical technique that was a closely guarded trade secret during the most fertile period of the silver firm’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How much should you spend? What kind of stone should you get? Is antique better than modern? These are just a few of the many questions that any courter must consider when ring-hunting. Here to share his ring lore on this special Valentine’s Day episode is a true jewelry expert, Matthew Imberman of Kentshire Galleries. First things first: don’t worry about cursed jewelry. In Imberman’s experience, it’s usually not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1909, Daisy Makeig-Jones was hired by the Wedgwood firm in Staffordshire, England, to decorate pottery. She would go on to develop the “Fairyland” luster pattern, which combined dazzling iridescent glazes with motifs from fairy tales and would serve to revitalize the Wedgwood brand. Bailey Tichenor, one half of the duo behind Artistoric gallery, comes on the pod to discuss a mid-1920s example of Makeig-Jones’s work called Poplar Trees, which boasts depictions of cypresses and other trees, a Japanese bridge, and winding river on the outside; inside are elves, flowers, and a mermaid medallion set among sparkling waves of glaze, along with a hidden treasure: the designer’s monogrammed signature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In what has become an annual tradition, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller capped off January with a panel discussion at the Winter Show. This year’s edition was named “Catching the Bug: Enriching Your Life Through Collecting,” and featured three distinguished collectors and the objects they live by and through. The Hawkes bowl belonging to conservator Lloyd Zuckerberg, interior designer Marcy Masterson’s Italian side chair, and the Etruscan hand mirror of artist and educator Thomas Lollar provide evidence not only of the discernment of their owners, but of some twenty-five hundred years of design history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the summer of 1966 the Beatles were in Japan, whirling through the first leg of what would be their final world tour. Hoping to forestall the dangerous excesses of Beatlemania, Japanese authorities confined the Fab Four to their hotel suite at Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel for almost the duration of their one-hundred-hour stay. Casting about for things to do, the Beatles fell to painting: each took upon himself to design one quadrant of an acrylic-and-watercolor artwork known as Images of a Woman, currently on offer from Christie’s as part of the auction house’s annual Exceptional Sale. The painting offers a novel look inside the collaborative practice of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, a story that Casey Rogers, senior vice president at Christie’s, elaborates on in this week's episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices