Wallace Nutting to be Focus of Portsmouth Events
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A New England clergyman-turned-entepreneur who helped create the mythic image of Old America will be celebrated in a series of upcoming events in Portsmouth, NH, beginning this spring with a play by Pontine Theatre.
Wallace Nutting’s Old America, produced in collaboration with the Portsmouth’s historic Wentworth-Gardner House, evokes the nostalgia, homespun pride and eccentric characters, including Nutting, that sparked the Colonial Revival Movement in the early 20th Century.
It premieres April 27-May 13 at West End Studio Theatre (W.E.S.T.), 959 Islington St.
Nutting left the pulpit after a nervous breakdown when he was 41 and proceeded to become such a skilled pioneer in cross-product branding and marketing that Martha Stewart would proudly claim him as an ancestor.
His wildly popular hand-tinted and signed photographs, as well as his restoration furniture, hooked rugs and other crafts conveyed a romantic, not always accurate, vision of Colonial times -- a period Nutting and others in the preservation movement saw as simpler, more beautiful and morally superior to their own era of growing industrialization and urbanization. In fact, one of Nutting’s most noted remarks was “Everything new is bad.”
Other Nutting-focused events in Portsmouth include:
- a community performance workshop, directed by Pontine;
- Wallace Nutting Collectors Club the annual convention and public auction;
- publication of Nutting in Portsmouth by historian Richard Candee;
- exhibit at the Wentworth-Gardner House (once owned by Nutting);
- lecture series, sponsored by the Wentworth-Gardner House;
- artist-in-residence recreating a Nutting-era mural in the Wentworth-Gardner House; and
- various crafts workshops and children’s programs at the Wentworth-Gardner House, some in collaboration with the Portsmouth Children’s Museum.
See the Events Calendar for dates.