Johns Hopkins University Museums

Naturally Beautiful: Uncovering Nature in the Nineteenth-Century Home
2021-09-24 11:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Homewood Museum, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD, 21218, United States
In Naturally Beautiful: Uncovering Nature in the Nineteenth-Century Home, Homewood Museum mines its impressive collection of decorative arts to explore how environmental factors shaped tastes and trends in home furnishings in the early American republic. From mahogany furniture that resulted in mass deforestation to lithographs that celebrated the new nation’s natural splendor, the house-wide exhibition reveals early Americans’ complex relationship to their environment and Baltimore’s role as a bustling port of trade and taste-making city. On view September 23, 2021 – March 27, 2022.
PLEASE NOTE: The exhibition is on view with regular museum admission. Please click here to book a tour of the museum.

EXHIBITION OPENING Naturally Beautiful: Uncovering Nature in the Nineteenth-Century Home
2021-09-23 17:00 - 19:00
Join Homewood Museum for the grand opening of its new exhibition, Naturally Beautiful: Uncovering Nature in the Nineteenth-Century Home. Explore the museum-wide exhibition and hear a special talk by Dr. Laura Turner Igoe, Curator of American Art at the Michener Art Museum, titled “A Mass of Materials: An Eco-critical Approach to Early American Decorative Arts.”
PLEASE NOTE: In accordance with the policies of our parent institution, The Johns Hopkins University, all visitors to Homewood Museum are required to wear a mask when inside campus buildings.
EVENT SCHEDULE
5 p.m. Explore the exhibition at Homewood Museum
6 p.m. Talk and Q&A with Laura Turner Igoe at Gilman Hall, Room 50 on the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In Naturally Beautiful: Uncovering Nature in the Nineteenth-Century Home, Homewood Museum mines its impressive collection of decorative arts to explore how environmental factors shaped tastes and trends in home furnishings in the early American republic. From mahogany furniture that resulted in mass deforestation to lithographs that celebrated the new nation’s natural splendor, the house-wide exhibition reveals early Americans’ complex relationship to their environment and Baltimore’s role as a bustling port of trade and taste-making city. On view September 23, 2021 – March 27, 2022.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Laura Turner Igoe, Ph.D., is the Curator of American Art at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She specializes in American art and material culture of the long nineteenth century, and its engagement with environmental conditions and change. She is the co-editor of A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination, and she has contributed essays to the journals American Art, Panorama, Common-place, and the award-winning exhibition catalog Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment.
