Crafting Reform: The Saturday Evening Girls and the Paul Revere Pottery with Nonie Gadsden

About this event

Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Saturday Evening Girls’ club was established in 1899 to provide cultural activities for Italian and Jewish immigrant girls who lived in the tenements of Boston’s North End. In 1908, the reform-minded club leaders founded a pottery to provide the girls with a clean and educational venue in which to earn money. They named the enterprise the Paul Revere Pottery in honor of the patriot’s home which stood near their clubhouse, and to emphasize their own desire to be seen as Americans, not foreign immigrants. The pottery exemplified the ideals of the early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts movement, a design reform movement which sought to alleviate the negative social effects of industrialized society by promoting hand craftsmanship, the integration of art into everyday life, and healthy working conditions for artisans. Nonie Gadsden is the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where she is responsible for a wide range of artwork including decorative arts and sculpture from North, Central and South America, from ancient times through the 20th century. Her recent work includes a leadership role in reimagining of the 18th-century galleries in the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation (2026), curating the exhibition “Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction” (2023-24), serving as lead curator for “Women Take the Floor” (2019-2021); developing new 20th century galleries, including “Art and Jazz” and “Folk Meets Modernism” (opened 2022); and a publication based on the MFA’s collection of American modern design, America Goes Modern: The Rise of the Industrial Designer (2022). Gadsden received her BA in American Studies from Yale College and her MA in Early American Culture from the Winterthur Program of the University of Delaware. This lecture is presented as a part of our 2026 Lowell Lecture Series, “Engrave,…