Rent your next exhibition from Historic New England

Historic New England offers a variety of exhibitions for rental to museums, historic houses, galleries, and libraries. Designed to appeal to a wide audience, these exhibitions draw from Historic New England's Library and Archives of more than one million items that document the region's architectural and cultural history, as well as from the extraordinarily broad object collection, the largest assemblage of New England art and artifacts in the country.

Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or at 617-227-3957, extension 246, for availability and a full checklist.

Available exhibitions:



The Preservation Movement Then and Now

Historic New England, the region’s premier preservation organization, has developed this engaging panel exhibition that traces the history of the preservation movement in New England. This panel exhibition highlights the unsuccessful effort to save Boston’s Hancock House in 1863, which was the early catalyst for preservation in the region. It continues by examining how the movement evolved to include saving buildings of architectural interest as well as those associated with historic personages and events. The exhibition concludes with an overview of preservation today, which can encompass twentieth-century buildings, streetscapes, neighborhoods, and open spaces. Using a template provided by the exhibition designer, an additional panel tailored to preservation in your community can be created for an extra fee.

Contents

  • 11 panels with text and images
  • 1 credit panel
  • Brochure on preservation resources available in New England

Fee: $3,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.



A Changing World: New England in the Photographs of Verner Reed, 1950-1972

A Changing World surveys changing patterns in New England's social fabric as captured by the lens of a photographer with a keen eye and a warm sense of humor. Verner Reed worked for Life magazine from 1953 to 1958. His photographs were also featured in national magazines such as Fortune and Time, as well as in Vermont Life and other regional publications. This exhibition of Reed's work is divided into sections that reflect significant areas of his oeuvre: photo essays, artistic work, scenes of urban and rural life, children, portraits and character studies, and images best described as "telling moments." Key themes emerge in this overview of Reed's work, including the contrast between rural and urban life, the person-to-person directness of American politics, the evolving notion of "the famous," awareness of environmental issues, and an affection for "old New England" as an ideal way of life. A variety of supplemental materials – magazines in which Reed's work was published and his photographic equipment – as well as a family guide are included. The exhibition draws from the Verner Reed Archive, donated to Historic New England by Verner and Deborah Reed in 2002.

View our narrated virtual tour of A Changing World.

View a selection of Verner Reed's photographs in "Looking at Life" from the Historic New England magazine archives.

Contents

  • 78 black-and-white photographs, printed under the artist's supervision in black wooden frames, various sizes
  • 2 photo panels
  • 4 banners
  • All printed section and object labels

A book of Reed's photographs is also available through Historic New England Retail Operations.

Fee: $4,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.



The Camera's Coast

The Camera's Coast presents seventy images from the Historic New England collection depicting life along the New England coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were years of great social and economic change. Many traditional occupations, from alongshore fishing to shipbuilding to deep-water voyaging, were in decline. As the number of people who could afford vacations grew and improved transportation made it easy for them to flee the city in the summertime, coastal recreation boomed. Boating and yachting blossomed. Pioneering photographers represented in The Camera's Coast include Nathaniel L. Stebbins, Henry G. Peabody, Baldwin Coolidge, Emma L. Coleman, and Fred Quimby. Subjects depicted include square-riggers, coasting schooners, fishing vessels and fishing ports, steamships and steamboats, tugs, small boats and large yachts, summer hotels and fishermen's shacks, beach houses, mansion houses, rusticators, fishermen, seaweed gatherers, lifesavers, and saltmarsh haymakers.

View a selection of the photographs in The Camera's Coast from the Historic New England magazine archives.

Contents

  • 70 black-and-white high quality copy prints in black metal frames, various sizes
  • 4 banners
  • All printed section and object labels

Fee: $4,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.



From Dairy to Doorstep: Milk Delivery in New England, 1860-1960

From Dairy to Doorstep is an entertaining panel exhibition that uses lively graphics and illustrations – including photographs and advertisements associated with milk production, delivery, and consumption – to chronicle the origins of home milk delivery and the heyday of the milkman. The story of how milk traveled from the cow to the New England kitchen table is the story of changing technologies, sanitation regulations, migrating populations, urbanization, fashionable tastes, local customs, and collective memories. It is also a tale of gender: men delivered the milk and women prepared the food. The exhibition is supplemented by two videos, one containing interviews with milkmen giving visitors a first-hand look at what it was like to deliver milk by horse-drawn wagons and sleds in all kinds of weather and to all kinds of customers; and the second, Milk Parade, c. 1930, narrated by Lowell Thomas, on dairying and the pasteurization process. A memory book is available for visitors to share their milk or milkman stories. The exhibition is easily augmented by objects found in most history museum collections.

Contents

  • 19 panels with text and images
  • 2 videotapes

Fee: $3,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.



Lost Gardens of New England

Lost Gardens of New England draws on the wealth of images – drawings, watercolors, and historic photographs – in Historic New England's collection. The exhibition uses reproduction material to depict New England gardens, great and small, that no longer exist or only partially survive. Three sections explore major themes of American landscape history: the New Republic, House and Garden Beautiful, and Revival Gardens. Landscape drawings provide insight into how these gardens were conceived and visualized by their creators, either amateur or professional. Photographs capture the gardens and their features in their glory as well as the people who maintained and enjoyed them. The images selected illustrate New England's rich garden design traditions and offer inspiration to gardeners today.

View our narrated virtual tour of Lost Gardens of New England.

Contents

  • 28 framed images
  • 9 text panels 9

Fee: $3,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.



Pilgrims, Patriots and Products: Selling the Colonial Image

Pilgrims, Patriots and Products explores how the marketplace has exploited a mythical image of America's colonial past. This entertaining and thought-provoking panel exhibition examines how advertisers have used romanticized imagery about America's past to sell commercial products, a practice that continues even to this day. In response to economic uncertainties, labor unrest, rapid industrialization and urbanization, and a rise in immigration, Americans in the decades after the country's 1876 Centennial looked to their colonial past for validation and reassurance. The exhibition panels are divided into eight sections: architecture, furniture, household furnishings and products, appliances, silver, food, clothing, and Priscilla Alden, who became an icon of the Puritan era. Each panel contains colorful reproductions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century product catalogs, trade cards, advertisements, calendars, and posters. The exhibition is easily augmented by objects found in most history museum collections and by present-day ephemera.

View a selection of Pilgrims, Patriots and Products images from the Historic New England magazine archives.

Contents

  • 9 panels, text and images
  • 2 framed prints of John and Priscilla Alden
  • A videotape is available

Fee: $3,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.



Boston Close Up: Windows on a New Century

Boston Close Up offers a glimpse of Boston daily life around the turn of the twentieth century. The photographic panels capture details of ordinary life as it appeared in the commercial and residential streets of the city. Photographs of Washington Street, the waterfront and Charlestown taken in 1899, 1900 and 1901 are featured. These images were chosen from a collection of more than 500 cyanotype prints in the Historic New England Library and Archives, and were most likely commissioned by the Boston Elevated Railway Company to record buildings along its proposed route from Sullivan Square in Charlestown to Dudley Street in Roxbury. Comparing past and present, there are several views of the same sites today by photographer Peter Vanderwarker, who has been documenting Boston since 1977.

View our narrated virtual tour of Boston Close Up.

Contents

  • 10 panels and text and images
  • 16 framed black-and-white photographs, including 9 by noted photographer Peter Vanderwarker

Fee: $2,500 for a three-month period plus one-way shipping. Contact Exhibitions Manager Ken Turino at kturino@historicnewengland.org or 617-227-3957, ext. 246, for full checklist.


 


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