PROGRAM DETAILS
Date: Thurs, June 15, 2023 | 6-7:30 PM
Location: History Hall | NUMU | 106 E Main St
Cost: FREE with registration
Join Richard D. Mohr, ceramics historian and author of several books on LGBTQ+ social and political issues, for part two of a lecture series on local artists Frank Ingerson and George Dennison, who are the subjects of his recent book The Splendid Disarray of Beauty: The Boys, the Tiles, the Joy of Cathedral Oaks - A Study in the Arts and Crafts Community. In this presentation, Mohr will discuss the social importance and impact of Ingerson and Dennison’s well-known romantic relationship, and how The Boys contributed to queer history as arguably America’s first transparently common-law-married gay couple.
Copies of The Splendid Disarray of Beauty: The Boys, the Tiles, the Joy of Cathedral Oaks - A Study in the Arts and Crafts Community will be available for purchase at the talk for $75 plus tax. Reserve a copy when registering.
This lecture series is co-presented by NUMU and the Los Gatos Library.
About the Author
Richard D. Mohr is an academically trained author with extensive journalistic experience and literary flair.
He publishes books in three widely diverse fields: ancient Greek metaphysics, especially Plato’s; American ceramics, especially from the Arts & Crafts period; and gay studies along with queer theory, focusing on ethical, social, political, and legal issues.
His book Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies (Beacon) was banned in Canada and won the 1992 Lambda Literary Awards’ Editor’s Choice Award, a prize hors concours.
The chapter on gay marriage in his book A More Perfect Union (Beacon 1994), in its treatment of privacy law and understanding of what marriage is, lay the conceptual groundwork for the Supreme Court’s 2015 gay marriage ruling.
His book Pottery, Politics, Art on George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick (U. Illinois Press, 2003) explores abjection and grotesquery in America's imagination and ceramics as it excavates the dark brains of three of America’s most brazen potters.
Mohr’s most recent book, The Splendid Disarray of Beauty: The Boys, the Tiles, the Joy of Cathedral Oaks ― A Study in Arts and Crafts Community (RIT Press, 2023) blends the author’s interests in things queer and things ceramic as it recounts a fifty-five yearlong love story set in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains that began when two fellows approaching middle age set up a summers-only art school where some of the country's most beguiling art tiles were briefly made in 1912, before the men, known in their community as The Boys, moved on to a glamorous career as interior decorators in Hollywood and Europe, designing the Coconut Grove, dining with the Peerage in London, and restoring frescos in Italy. A couple of sweeties, the Boys were the shock of the ordinary.
Richard Mohr has written for The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Reason magazine, Raritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Bioethics, The Advocate, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and Mind among many other periodicals. Across the 1990s, he self-syndicated opinion columns in the gay press, playing the role of classical liberal gadfly. Since 1993, he has been a regular contributor to the Journal of the American Art Pottery Association, where he has published serializations on Van Briggle, Rookwood, Teco, and the Prairie School’s use of ceramics.
He holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and of the Classics at the University of Illinois. He and his hubby of 45 years live in Urbana, Illinois.
