Victoria Mansion, a historic house museum in Portland, Maine, is a rare, intact example of a pre-Civil War Italianate villa.  Surviving with over 90 percent of its original furnishings and decorative art more than 165 years after its construction, it houses the last complete commissions by interior decorator Gustave Herter and decorative painter Giuseppe Guidicini. 

Join Victoria Mansion Executive Director Tim Brosnihan for a tour of the house’s remarkable art and architecture and an overview of the museum’s efforts to conserve and restore the property over the last half century.

"Avant-Garde in the Alley" pulls back the curtain on the creative art and theater scene of the bohemian enclave of Towertown. The Near North Side neighborhood served as a laboratory for performance art, modernist sensibilities, and counterculture during the 1920s. Presented by Zac Bleicher, Executive Director of Edgar Miller Legacy, this talk will explore how Chicago’s Interwar art scene became a melting pot of interdisciplinary creativity, where radical thought was openly championed– and challenged– on soapboxes in park squares, in local homes and salons, and in back-alley theatres.

The city's performing arts spaces allowed creative professionals to experiment with small-scale, avant-garde aesthetics that would define a uniquely American modernism. Approached through the perspective of renowned Chicago artist Edgar Miller and the avant-garde performances presented in spaces like the Dil Pickle Club, this talk will highlight how Chicago artists of the Twenties brought new ideas to life, first on the stage and then out into a modernizing urban environment.

Learn how Edgar Miller’s art, the work of other artists, non-traditional staging and set designs, and avant-garde literature merged to establish Chicago as a central site for American modernism. Several original pieces of Miller’s art will be on display.

This talk is being presented in conjunction with a staged reading of “Dear Rhoda” at Glessner House on Monday, November 16, performed by The Shakespeare Project of Chicago, which takes place in the Towertown scene of the Roaring Twenties.