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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
617-994-5958, for availability and a full checklist.
Available exhibitions:
America's Kitchens
America’s Kitchens traces the role of the kitchen in people’s lives from the seventeenth century to today.
Based on extant historical kitchens and primary research, the exhibition features innovative design, including recreated kitchen vignettes of a seventeenth-century New England hearth kitchen, nineteenth-century Victorian kitchen in Illinois, traditional Southwest adobe kitchen, and a 1950s turquoise kitchen.
The vignettes are created with a combination of room-size graphic murals, artifacts, such as a 1920s Hoosier cabinet, photographs, and personal stories. Kitchen activities are evident, as if the individuals have momentarily stepped away. The visitor has the opportunity to “meet” the members of the household, step into their surroundings, and gain a greater understanding of the ways in which the kitchen is considered the heart of the home.
Recreated kitchen scenes are enhanced by thematic areas. Here, objects from various time periods explore topics in more depth, such as cooking technology (iron kettles, cookstoves, a crock pot and the George Forman grill), and food preservation (a barrel packed with sand, an ice box, a monitor top refrigerator and Tupperware®).These objects are enhanced with interpretive graphics, and photographic reproductions.
A variety of interactives engages both family and adult visitors, creating an experience that takes them beyond the museum walls, and encourages them to apply the exhibition’s themes to their own lives.
America’s Kitchens’ 1,700-square-foot concept plan is a flexible design that travels well and adapts easily to different gallery configurations.
Contents:
- Six vignettes: New England Hearth, Plantation Kitchen, Southwest Kitchen, Victorian Kitchen, Efficient Kitchen, and 1950s Kitchen.
- Five thematic areas: Cooking Technology, Food Preservation, Cookbooks, Kids and Cooking, and Kitchens of Today.
- Five interactives: butter churning, grain grinding, building an efficient kitchen, take- away recipe cards, and your kitchen stories.
Fee:
To request a prospectus or inquire about a rental fee please contact Joanne Flaherty at jflaherty@historicnewengland.org or 617-994-6629.
The award winning America’s Kitchens publication is available at wholesale pricing to exhibition venues.
 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 617-994-5958, 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 617-994-5958, 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 617-994-5958, 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 617-994-5958, 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 617-994-5958, 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 617-994-5958, for full checklist.
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