Queer Moderns | Alice Friedman, Cheryl & Jeffrey Katz in Conversation

$20 Suggested Donation

In Queer Moderns, Alice T. Friedman tells the fascinating story of the queer avant-garde of the 1920s and '30s in New York, Paris, and Venice, as seen through the eyes of Max Ewing (1903-1934), a young musician, photographer, and man-about-town who, although virtually unknown today, moved in extraordinary circles. In his photographs and letters, we meet the rising stars of modern art, music, dance, and literature and enter a world of interracial friendship, "queer space," and experimentation that shone brightly before being swept away by the Depression. It is a remarkable story that reveals that the history of modernism is more queer and more Black than previously recognized.

Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor emerita of the History of American Art and former Director of the McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College. She also serves as co-director of the Architecture Program. Her courses focus on the history of European and North American architecture, with an emphasis on social history, gender, and cultural studies. Recent seminars include “Modernisms,” “The Architecture of Leisure,” “Le Corbusier and Modern Architecture,” “Architecture and the Spirit,” and “The Villa.”

Friedman is the author of numerous books and articles on domestic architecture, women’s history and patronage, including House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family; Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History; and, most recently, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture.

Cheryl Katz is a local girl. She stayed close to home when her parents convinced her to go to the School of Education at Boston University. But in her heart, she knew that fashion, retail, and design was her true calling. After a couple of years teaching and writing curriculum, she wrangled a job at Bonwit Teller and never looked back. As luck would have it, while at Bonwit’s, Cheryl ran into an old friend who helped her land a job in the fashion office of Jordan Marsh Company. This is when her real education began.

Jeffrey Katz studied architecture at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Right after getting a Bachelor of Architecture degree he headed to Cambridge to continue his studies and a year later received a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. That’s when he met Cheryl, and three years later they were married. He spent the next several years at an architecture firm in Boston—where he worked with the partner in charge of interiors—and teaching at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

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