A spatial interface to twenty essays on the objects and themes of the exhibit as well as the objects and landmarks
More informationThe important landmarks that stood at this important Broadway intersection over time and by site
More informationA look at the technical processes along with the men and women who made all these cultural commodities in New York
More informationHannah Wirta Kinney
Claire McRee
Kelsey Brow
Andrew Gardner
Kirstin Purtich
Kirstin Purtich
Claire McRee
Laura Kelly-Bowditch
Kelsey Brow
Virginia Fister
Martina D’Amato
Zahava Friedman-Stadler
Virginia Spofford
Virginia Spofford
Martina D'Amato
Virginia Fister
Andrew Gardner
John Rogers
Checkers Up at the Farm
1867
Painted plaster
20 × 17 1/4 × 11 1/4 in. (50.8 × 43.8 × 28.6 cm)
The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. Samuel V. Hoffman, 1928.29
John Rogers’s groups were a principal feature of many middle-class parlors in New York as well as the rest of the country. Rogers came to New York in 1860 and began mass-producing and selling his putty-colored plaster figurines from his Brooklyn “factory” and his Broadway showrooms by rejecting neoclassical scenes and the costly medium of marble in favor of everyday nineteenth-century scenes and plaster at an average price of fifteen dollars. One of his most popular groups, Checkers Up at the Farm, sold more than five thousand copies. With his wife and child looking on, the farmer in this group wins a checkers game against an urbane man, suggesting the symbolic triumph of traditional “country” values over modern city ways, a nostalgic sentiment appealing to upwardly mobile urban residents.
— Virginia Fister