November
1, 2002
Art
Historian James O'Gorman to Lecture November 8
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Photo: Cervin Robinson
James O'Gorman
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As
smoking rates decline in the United States and demand for American-grown
tobacco dwindles, many tobacco farmers are diversifying their
crops or moving into other businesses, leaving their curing barns
as memorials to a disappearing industry. Such is the case in the
Connecticut River valley, once a major producer of cigar leaf
tobacco. Best-selling author and art historian James O'Gorman
has brought to life the risks and rewards of living and working
close to the seasons in his new book, Connecticut Valley Vernacular:
The Vanishing Landscape and Architecture of the New England Tobacco
Fields. He will speak about tobacco farming and tobacco barns
as vernacular architecture at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
Friday, November 8, at 7 pm. The art museum galleries will be
open for the program. A reception will follow.
O'Gorman's
work, which draws on oral histories, newspaper reports, agricultural
diaries, and vintage and newly commissioned photos, continues
the Weissman Center's semester-long exploration of writing
and thinking about travel and tourism, Destinations: New Meanings
of Travel. "O'Gorman's elegy for New England's
rural heritage expands our understanding of tourist views of the
Pioneer Valley," says Marianne Doezema, director of the art
museum, where Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke
is currently on view. The exhibition explores the cultural and
historical significance of the mountain that was the second most
visited tourist site in the country in the nineteenth century.
"When landscape painter Thomas Cole
created View from Mt. Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), the centerpiece of Changing
Prospects, he had already read travel literature that celebrated
the view of both wilderness and cultivation afforded by the mountain
that looms over the Pioneer Valley," said Doezema. "Cole's
painting features that same combination, showing both the sweep
of God's handiwork and the fertile fields of the Connecticut
River Valley."
O'Gorman, Grace
Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley
College, is widely acclaimed as an author, lecturer, editor, consultant,
and historian. He teaches courses in the history of painting,
sculpture, and architecture in the United States from colonial
times through World War II. O'Gorman has a Ph.D. from Harvard
and has taught at Wellesley since 1975. He is the author of numerous
books including the best-seller ABC of Architecture. In
1981 O'Gorman received the first Historical Collections Prize
from the Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts, for his article
"Twentieth Century Gothick: The Hammond Castle Museum in
Gloucester and Its Antecedents." A life fellow and emeritus
member of the board of directors of the Philadelphia Athenaeum,
he is a past president of the Society of Architectural Historians,
a former board member of the Victorian Society in America, and
former editor of the journals for both organizations. In 1998
he received the Henry Russell Hitchcock Prize from the Victorian
Society in America and the Annual Book Award of the Society for
the Preservation of New England Antiquities for his Living
Architecture: A Biography of H. H. Richardson.
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