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The curious histories behind board games, at the American Folk Art Museum
33 Plays1 year ago
In this week’s episode, Ben Miller speaks with Emelie Gevalt, curatorial chair for collections and curator of folk art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. On view starting September 13 at the museum is the exhibition Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture, an exhibition co-curated by Gevalt, who has brought along one special example to discuss: a nineteenth century painted-wood Game of the Goose board.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Curious Objects' Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:14
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I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:15
Speaker
This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Highlighting the American Folk Art Museum
00:00:24
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I am truly embarrassed that it has taken until now to devote an episode of Curious Objects to the American Folk Art Museum.
00:00:32
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This is a phenomenal institution based in New York City.
00:00:36
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They have a wonderful and really unique collection that highlights areas of artistic and creative work that you simply won't see in most art museums.
00:00:48
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In a lot of ways, it gets at the heart of what Curious Objects is all about, which is understanding people and culture and history through the objects that we make and use.
00:01:00
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And don't be fooled by the name, the Folk Art Museum does exhibit pieces of exceptional quality and aesthetic achievement.
00:01:09
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But unlike most encyclopedic collections, their goal isn't just to find the quote-unquote best pieces according to whatever standard.
00:01:17
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They want to show pieces that are revealing, that show sides of society that you wouldn't see otherwise, that challenge assumptions about how people live, what they valued, and what they cared about.
Interview with Emily Javalt on Antique Game Boards
00:01:29
Speaker
So I am thrilled finally to be interviewing Emily Javalt.
00:01:33
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She is the curatorial chair for collections and curator of folk art at the American Folk Art Museum.
00:01:39
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Welcome to Curious Objects.
00:01:41
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Thank you so much, Ben.
00:01:42
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It's really a delight to be here.
00:01:45
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And there is honestly so much we could talk about, and you and I have run through a lot of possibilities together, but there is a particular exhibition opening on September 13th that I think is just so cool, and it is all about antique game boards.
00:02:02
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And the museum recently received the donation of a huge collection of games.
00:02:08
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And I love playing board games.
00:02:11
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So this is right up my alley.
00:02:13
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We're talking chess, Parcheesi, Beckham, and chutes and ladders, etc, etc, etc.
00:02:19
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So these are fundamentally very functional objects.
00:02:24
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But they're also beautiful handmade artifacts that reach out and pull us into the intimate spaces of 19th and early 20th century American homes.
00:02:36
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But before we get to all of that, Emily, are you ready for some rapid fire questions?
00:02:42
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I don't know.
00:02:43
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I guess I'm as ready as I'll ever be.
00:02:45
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I guess we'll find out.
00:02:46
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So first up, did you cheat at Monopoly as a kid?
00:02:51
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Oh my God.
00:02:51
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No, I was a real player by the rules.
00:02:55
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I was really a goody two shoes.
00:02:57
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I was, I was not someone to issue any kind of rules set out before me.
00:03:05
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But I was very competitive.
00:03:07
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I was very competitive.
00:03:09
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And on a few occasions I had to, I think I had to be removed from the field of play because I was taking it a little bit too seriously.
00:03:17
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Well, if you don't take Monopoly too seriously, you're not playing it right.
00:03:22
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Do you have a favorite board game?
00:03:26
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You know, I was really a big fan of Candyland.
00:03:29
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I really liked the immersion into the particular aesthetic and infectionary fantasies of that world.
00:03:36
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I think I remember there was some kind of
00:03:39
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I don't know, there were some sort of dark aspects of that game where you could get stuck in like a gooey peanut butter swamp, or there was sort of this creepy guy in purple lurking around the corner too.
00:03:51
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Although I might be completing that with the purple pie man from Strawberry Shortcake, but very evocative.
00:03:57
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Obviously it stays, stays with me in my memory.
00:04:00
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Did it lead you to sort of, uh, imaginative storytelling and world building where you sort of constructing stories around your character as you went through the game?
00:04:10
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Oh, I don't know if I really remember that in particular.
00:04:14
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I do remember being very intent on having the little dog as my player piece for Monopoly and having forbid I had to be like the shoe or the top hat.
00:04:28
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That was really devastating.
00:04:29
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So the avatar was important to me.
00:04:35
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But yeah, I don't remember any other real
00:04:39
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imaginative components of the game on that level.
00:04:45
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Okay, changing gears for a second.
00:04:47
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There is a giant comet heading toward Earth and you, Emily, lucky duck, you are on the escape pod.
00:04:56
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What one object or work of art are you bringing with
Exploring Material Culture in Film and Art
00:05:00
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you?
00:05:00
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Oh my god, well, assuming that it can't be a living creature,
00:05:10
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I would have to go with some kind of needlework.
00:05:14
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And this reveals a bias right now because my next exhibition in the work later down the line is going to be a major loan show of schoolgirl art, including...
00:05:27
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embroidery and in particular 18th century embroidery is a special love of mine.
00:05:32
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So whether that would be useful to me in outer space, I'm not sure, but it certainly would give me something nice to look at and remind me of home.
00:05:44
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It's a very personal sort of touch of humanity.
00:05:46
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I like that.
00:05:47
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Yes, yes.
00:05:49
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What movie has the most interesting depiction of material culture?
00:05:53
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:05:54
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Wow.
00:05:54
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These are hard questions.
00:05:56
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I love the material world of the Age of Innocence.
00:05:59
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I always remember being especially kind of in awe of the art direction of that film and how much you kind of felt like you were being pulled into the path.
00:06:14
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Also always been super impressed.
00:06:16
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And again, this is my personal bias for like super early histories of New England, but the witch horror is a particular area of interest for me.
00:06:27
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And I thought that the makers of the witch did an incredible job of really representing that world of 17th century Massachusetts.
00:06:38
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Wow.
00:06:38
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Okay.
00:06:39
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That's going on my list.
00:06:41
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What artist or craftsperson, living or dead, would you invite to dinner?
00:06:47
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I would love to be visited by an early woman artist like Artemisia Gentilevsky or someone coming with a special perspective on how women have
00:07:04
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have the real role that women played in the earlier centuries of the history of Western art, who could really tell us what it was like and that we could fully understand how those histories have been eclipsed by the subsequent male-dominated world of the market and also the telling of art history.
00:07:29
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I hope you'll take careful notes of that dinner.
00:07:31
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I'd love to read.
00:07:35
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What's one book that a newcomer to folk art should read to start to understand the field?
00:07:42
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Oh, that's an easy one.
00:07:43
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Penny Stillinger is a kind of archaeology that is a Bible for understanding the, not only kind of some of the key categories that you might find in a museum of folk art, but also for understanding the constructed nature of
00:07:59
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the field because folk art really evolved as a market category at the same time as the history of modern art.
00:08:08
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And so another good candidate actually would be to read up on Edith Halpert because we really see in her career kind of the importance of the interplay between the modern art market and what art
00:08:21
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you know in many ways uh Halpert helped develop the folk art market and how um how it was those two forces kind of playing together that really brought um brought uh modern art to the fore and I think folk art got a little bit marginalized in the process but um at the folk art at the American folk art museum we are in the um really honored position of being able to um devote our mission to shining a spotlight on
00:08:50
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works that have historically often found themselves sort of not at the center of the stage.
00:08:57
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And so it's really a great privilege and unendingly interesting to be able to dig into the stories of some of these lesser known objects like game boards.
Investigating Historical Artifacts
00:09:11
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In that vein, what is the coolest art or decorative arts discovery that you've made?
00:09:18
Speaker
Well, I've gone down a lot of rabbit holes lately.
00:09:22
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And I will tell you though that earlier on in my career, one of the coolest topics that I had the pleasure of diving into was the history of these beautiful paint decorated early 18th century chests from Massachusetts known as Taunton chests.
00:09:40
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And during my
00:09:44
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master's program at Winter Tour, I was able to develop a project that looked not only at their history, the history of these chests in the 18th century and their maker, Robert Crossman, but also at kind of the colonial revival moment when these chests were rediscovered.
00:10:02
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So I'm giving you someone else's discovery, not my own, but I really enjoyed kind of and often enjoy looking back at earlier material through the lens of
00:10:13
Speaker
that moment in the 20th century when folk art and Americana more broadly kind of became a source of discovery for so many collectors and for the American art market when they said, hang on, we don't need to only be collecting European things.
00:10:27
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You know, we want to focus on the material legacy of the United States and kind of
00:10:33
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define ourselves as Americans through those objects.
00:10:36
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And needless to say, it was often a very white male perspective that left a lot of folks out of the story.
00:10:45
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But I think there were a group of women in particular who really laid the groundwork for understanding
00:10:53
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early Americana, historically and materially, like Esther Stevens Brazer, who was not only an early historian, but also an early pioneer in the restoration of paint-decorated objects that we might now call folk art.
00:11:13
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Okay, last rapid-fire question.
00:11:15
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What was the last object or work of art you saw that gave you shivers?
00:11:19
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not to speak too much about my own projects, but I've got to say the other exhibition that we have opening up at the museum this fall is our Shaker Gift Drawings exhibition.
00:11:31
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And these incredible drawings, which were made mostly by women in the mid 19th century, are spiritual.
00:11:41
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They're
00:11:43
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believed to be divine messages that were conveyed to women in Shaker communities during the moment of religious revival in the mid-19th century.
00:11:55
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And these are objects that I think really upend our expectations in many ways about Shaker communities.
00:12:00
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uh, material culture, which we so often think of as, as very minimalist and plain, uh, and simple even.
00:12:07
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Um, but these are objects that are replete with color and ornamentation and kind of subversive in that sense, because it was, it was actually not in keeping with typical shaker rules, um, that you created pictorial designs.
00:12:21
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Um, but, uh, I think for folks who are able to come and take a look at that show at the museum, as well as our game board show, um,
00:12:29
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There will be a lot of shivers going up spine as a result of these really incredible spiritually and imaginatively uplifting works of faith, but also of aesthetic imagination.
00:12:50
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Okay, well, we will be right back.
00:12:52
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You can see pictures at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:12:57
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If you'd like to reach out to me directly, I'm at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:13:06
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If you're listening right now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any other podcast app, make sure you've subscribed to Curious Objects so you see new
'Game of the Goose' Exhibition
00:13:16
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episodes as they come out.
00:13:17
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Both of those apps also let you give us a rating and review, which helps new listeners find the show.
00:13:23
Speaker
So please keep those coming and thanks for listening.
00:13:31
Speaker
I want to ask you about our curious object for today, which is this wonderfully whimsical and evocative game board for a game called Game of the Goose.
00:13:43
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And this is not a game that I had ever heard of before, I have to admit.
00:13:47
Speaker
Despite my love of board games, this is not one that's come across my table.
00:13:51
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So Emily, tell me, what is the Game of the Goose and what does this board actually look like?
00:13:59
Speaker
So I have to admit that I was not familiar with the game of the goose either until I began working on this exciting project, which is an upcoming exhibition at the museum displaying over 100 different handcrafted
00:14:18
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in many cases homemade game boards from the mid 19th century to the early 20th.
00:14:23
Speaker
I fell in love very quickly with this particular example, also sometimes referred to as the Royal Game of the Goose.
00:14:33
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It takes its inspiration from a game that originated in the courts of Europe in the late 15th century.
00:14:43
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And actually, surprisingly, although it's been adapted over time, it has many things in common with its antecedent.
00:14:52
Speaker
So this particular game board is painted on wood.
00:14:56
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It's about a 16-inch square object.
00:15:00
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inscribed with a circle in the center and a spiraled serpent of some kind with a forked tail.
00:15:08
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And he has been embedded with holes.
00:15:11
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I can tell you based on our knowledge of the game of the goose that there are 63 holes and that is significant as a number that has
00:15:21
Speaker
Historically had important symbolism, intended to signify the course of a human life.
00:15:32
Speaker
So, as with many board games, you expect to see various different hazards and possible boons along the way.
00:15:41
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The goose is typically thought to be a positive spot along the board, but there are obstacles you can run into.
00:15:49
Speaker
In this particular example, it's a little bit hard to tell what the different obstacles are, but traditionally they're obstacles like death or different rites of passage, like a bridge that each player has to control.
00:16:03
Speaker
has to surmount before reaching
Craftsmanship and Social Role of Board Games
00:16:06
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the end.
00:16:06
Speaker
So this follows kind of a typical format of what's usually in the board game world called a wraith game, which involves the throwing of dice and the moving along a path of some kind in order to reach
00:16:23
Speaker
a final destination.
00:16:24
Speaker
So there are all kinds of games that we can name that follow that path, including games like Monopoly.
00:16:33
Speaker
But this is sort of a prototype for the many games that were to come in the 19th century in particular when the production of board games rose greatly and started to infiltrate the American home.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:52
Speaker
So this is, in some sense, it's a bit of a life simulator.
00:16:56
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Yes.
00:16:57
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Like the game of life.
00:16:58
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Like you're going through the course of your life symbolically on this game board.
00:17:03
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Yeah.
00:17:04
Speaker
Which is a bit frightening to have it occur across the body of a serpent.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:09
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Yeah, especially this particular serpent who looks like he might be ready to kind of swallow you up at any moment.
00:17:15
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Absolutely.
00:17:16
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The versions of the game of the goose that we see.
00:17:18
Speaker
So the popularity of kind of hand painted board games is experiencing an uptick in
00:17:27
Speaker
American life.
00:17:28
Speaker
Um, and around the same time that we're seeing this happening in commercial production too, because of course with the development of chromolithography, um, it starts to become easier to produce, uh, printed, uh, board games.
00:17:43
Speaker
Uh, uh, this is a popular pastime in, um, in Great Britain that starts to, um, have an influence in the United States.
00:17:52
Speaker
And the first, um,
00:17:54
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popular printed board games are produced commercially in the United States in the 1840s.
00:17:59
Speaker
At that time, what's often cited as the first American commercially produced board game, we have the Mansion of Happiness, which, believe it or not, is also related to the Game of the Goose.
00:18:11
Speaker
And it's a very similar
00:18:14
Speaker
trajectory and this idea of moving through life, also like the game of life, which becomes popular around this time too.
00:18:23
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So we have this idea of moving through different stages, but printed versions of the game of the goose tend to be more benign looking than this particular one.
00:18:36
Speaker
You'll move along through different
00:18:39
Speaker
different printed images of a little goose egg.
00:18:44
Speaker
And perhaps that was sort of thought to be more wholesome for children who might be playing games.
00:18:50
Speaker
Although games like this were played by folks of all ages.
00:18:57
Speaker
Okay, so there's so much I want to get into with this and with many other game boards from the exhibition, and I want to talk about what these games meant to people.
00:19:09
Speaker
But just out of the gate about this particular game...
00:19:15
Speaker
the game of the goose I have three questions which are basically the questions I have about every curious object on this podcast so really quickly I want to know what makes it beautiful what makes it well crafted and what story does it want to tell us so take take that first one for us what makes this game board beautiful to you it's I realize that's a subjective question
00:19:42
Speaker
Maybe it isn't beautiful.
00:19:44
Speaker
No, I think it is absolutely beautiful.
00:19:47
Speaker
It is beautiful.
00:19:48
Speaker
And I think the tonality of paint and the visible aging to the surface, I think is one thing that it's actually done in
00:19:59
Speaker
in a variety of different creams and browns, and they resonate really wonderfully with one another.
00:20:06
Speaker
And then there are all these, you know, the folksy qualities of the animals, including the sort of ferocious face of the serpent, but then the kind of reassuring presence of these little birds proceeding along the path, interspersed with kind of different images of what looks like sort of castle-like architecture, these little turrets.
00:20:30
Speaker
What was the second question?
00:20:32
Speaker
What makes it well-crafted?
00:20:35
Speaker
You know, there's a real range of, I think, of craftsmanship that we see across these board games.
00:20:40
Speaker
There's one example that I would point to is really the apotheosis of craftsmanship in the show.
00:20:48
Speaker
And that's an incredible book form board.
00:20:51
Speaker
It's actually double-sided.
00:20:52
Speaker
It's shaped like a book.
00:20:54
Speaker
It has a very organized internal storage system where you pull out a drawer and there are little
00:21:02
Speaker
It's actually, I think, crafted out of an old cigar box, and it has all these little compartments where you can keep pieces and dice and things like that.
00:21:09
Speaker
And it's carved and incised and gilded, and it's just gorgeous.
00:21:13
Speaker
It has boards on either side of the book.
00:21:15
Speaker
It's called The Sailor's Bible.
00:21:18
Speaker
But I think there are also examples that are quite simple and that were made within the home as opposed to others made by professional artisans or made by folks in, for instance, the maritime community who we know were practiced in various handicrafts, including scrimshaw.
00:21:40
Speaker
So this particular example, I think, falls in kind of the middle of the
00:21:47
Speaker
of the pack a little bit, but I would say that it's in this case, unlike other examples that have quite a bit of carving and craftsmanship in that respect, this one is really a beautiful painted object.
00:22:00
Speaker
And paint was,
00:22:03
Speaker
the primary medium that so many different makers of these objects would turn to.
00:22:07
Speaker
It was accessible, it was relatively inexpensive, and it was something that a lot of different tradespeople had practice with for one reason or another.
00:22:18
Speaker
And what story does it want to tell us?
00:22:22
Speaker
Well, what I love about this board and so many of the boards in the show is that it tells us the story of imagination and the exuberance of possibility, creative possibility, even in a time when
00:22:43
Speaker
not everybody had access to uh the um you know sort of material riches or the wealth of material resources that um that we do in our um kind of materially saturated world today so um just about anybody could make a game board and uh it tells us also a story of uh
00:23:05
Speaker
of community and or of family life and of, you know, at least two people who wanted to get together and do something, um, for pleasure and enjoyment and to pass the time together and have a few laughs.
00:23:20
Speaker
Um, so, you know, I think they're also, um,
00:23:24
Speaker
a lot of boards that have didactic purposes.
00:23:27
Speaker
And we see, you know, even in games that are well known, like Parcheesi or Chinese checkers, we have examples where those boards have been inscribed with, you know, kind of moral directives or even religious directives, you know, make sure you're loving God while you're playing this game.
00:23:47
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Make sure you don't, you know, forget about the...
00:23:50
Speaker
the potential vices of having too much fun or gambling, which gambling certainly was an association with some of these games, the game of the goose, no exception.
00:24:01
Speaker
But I think those educational aims or those moral aims in the heat of the moment could fall by the wayside and folks were using these to make their day a little bit more pleasant and to spend time together.
00:24:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I wanted to ask about how these games were actually used.
00:24:23
Speaker
I mean, what's the context for these?
00:24:25
Speaker
Are we talking about family game night?
00:24:29
Speaker
Is this mostly, you know, children's diversions or are adults playing with these games?
00:24:33
Speaker
Are they down at the tavern, you know, with their dice?
00:24:36
Speaker
What's the context?
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, all of the above.
00:24:40
Speaker
And we have some great photographs, actually, in the exhibition that show...
00:24:44
Speaker
You know, everyone from children to, you know, to grown up friends, both men and women playing games who, you know, brought their game boards to the photo studio to have themselves pictured in that context.
00:25:00
Speaker
So it was amazing.
00:25:01
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Something that kind of went across multiple different areas of society, but, you know, they could be played at home.
00:25:10
Speaker
They could absolutely be played in a public space like a tavern.
00:25:13
Speaker
And in fact, we have games tables also sometimes that, that we, there are a couple examples in the show that were clearly tabletops at some point.
00:25:21
Speaker
And so we're, you know, we're designed for community use in,
00:25:27
Speaker
in a space like a tavern.
00:25:30
Speaker
We also seem to have examples that were made for particular communities like a children's classroom.
00:25:35
Speaker
In one instance, we have a checkerboard that has images pasted to it of different children, perhaps a school classroom.
00:25:47
Speaker
And then we have some adorable instances, for instance, of a chess or checkerboard with a husband's name on one side and the wife's name on the other.
00:25:57
Speaker
So, you know, not to say that they were the only ones necessarily playing these games.
00:26:01
Speaker
I think sometimes we
00:26:03
Speaker
You know, we also have presentation boards that are created as gifts and that may not have sustained as much use as others.
Cultural Exchange in Game Evolution
00:26:13
Speaker
And of course, we can tell that from from looking at the where we can we can see which examples were perhaps surprised for their beauty so much that they were not used as much as admired.
00:26:26
Speaker
Do the pieces ever survive with the board?
00:26:29
Speaker
Yes.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yes.
00:26:30
Speaker
And we have a couple of examples of that.
00:26:32
Speaker
We have a wonderful Masonic checker or chess board that has a sequence of death's heads and
00:26:44
Speaker
or an array of other Masonic symbols, including a rule and compass.
00:26:48
Speaker
And it also has a little inset drawer with pieces inside of it.
00:26:52
Speaker
We have a couple of different examples.
00:26:56
Speaker
One particular game that has called Fox, the Fox and the Geese, which actually still has the surviving geese, which you can set into.
00:27:05
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:27:06
Speaker
Into the holes of the board.
00:27:08
Speaker
So, yes, it's it's obviously more rare, but especially when a board has an accompanying storage, a built in storage mechanism, we do sometimes see the pieces survive.
00:27:19
Speaker
And that's really fun to see.
00:27:22
Speaker
A lot of geese.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:24
Speaker
What that's about?
00:27:25
Speaker
I don't know.
00:27:28
Speaker
Do you think there's a difference in how people relate to games today in the era of instant online entertainment as opposed to a time when Divergent was not quite so automatic or readily available?
00:27:43
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:44
Speaker
I mean, as someone who doesn't really play many games, either physical or online, I'm a bad person to ask that question.
00:27:53
Speaker
But imagine given the amount of time that I spend at my computer, at the end of the day, I would prefer to have, you know, be able to hold something in my hand or, you know, be in the physical world and, you
00:28:07
Speaker
You know, I think during the course of the pandemic, that may have been something that others chose to take up as well for similar reasons.
00:28:16
Speaker
But I even wonder about the contrast between, for example, these handmade, hand-painted games versus, as you were mentioning earlier, the advent of print of sort of larger production runs of printed games and how the experience of playing those games must be a little bit different.
00:28:37
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I think certainly the hand-painted ones offer an opportunity for the maker and the player ultimately to kind of engage in a much more specific personalized or localized kind of set of imaginings.
00:28:57
Speaker
And where, you know, the printed games kind of pick up on the
00:29:03
Speaker
more global universal experiences, potential or aspirations like games that focus on a trip around the world, um, or something like that.
00:29:14
Speaker
We have examples, um,
00:29:16
Speaker
in this exhibition, which is really one of the, you know, the sort of most expansive example I can think of in recent memory of a show that looks specifically at homemade or hand painted game boards in contrast with, you know, there have been other shows that have looked in particular collections of printed game boards.
00:29:41
Speaker
But yes, I think the difference really is, you know, to look at an example like this wonderful race game that we have, which kind of follows the mansion of happiness prototype that clearly is set in a maritime context.
00:29:58
Speaker
There, you know, it's all organized around a nautical route and there are wonderful things.
00:30:05
Speaker
features like a mermaid and a sea serpent but also a steamboat maybe a ferry boat and a what seems to be a nantucket sleigh ride uh otherwise known as the you know harpooning of a whale and the whale um running off with a with a the small um uh whaler boat behind behind him um
00:30:29
Speaker
And, you know, it's something like that, I think that really is exciting to behold, because we really have an understanding of the local context of an object like that.
00:30:41
Speaker
The equivalent, you know, a printed mansion of happiness game is just not going to give us that same kind of very personalized look at the world.
00:30:52
Speaker
And I think that's one of the
00:30:55
Speaker
most wonderful things about folk art, broadly speaking, is the very localized, personalized view that we get through so many of these objects.
00:31:05
Speaker
I was interested to see how many of these games have non-Western origins.
00:31:10
Speaker
I mean, we've talked about, so Game of the Goose, you mentioned, does come from England from the 15th century.
00:31:17
Speaker
But if you think about Parcheesi, chess, chutes and ladders even has origins in ancient India.
00:31:28
Speaker
Not Chinese checkered, there are several Chinese checkered boards.
00:31:32
Speaker
uh in the exhibition but those i learned are not at all chinese that that affiliation was just a marketing tactic by american distributors so that was sort of funny that's interesting i don't know very much about chinese checkers um but yes you're absolutely right i think it's really interesting to see um to see in particular how um there are more parcheesi games in the show than any other example um
00:31:59
Speaker
I don't think that's necessarily representative of the production of the games historically.
00:32:03
Speaker
I think that the Parcheesi game board lends itself to some really beautiful designs.
00:32:11
Speaker
And I think the Wendells who built this incredible collection recognized that and see the kind of the
00:32:21
Speaker
the geometric abstraction in those Parcheesi boards is really especially striking.
00:32:28
Speaker
But yes, so that particular game originated in India, although there's a debate about when.
00:32:36
Speaker
And in fact, it's just really interesting to read, to go into the particular niche of board game studies and read some of the articles about
00:32:48
Speaker
the origins of Purchese.
00:32:49
Speaker
And I think there has long been a sense, I think, as often happens with Native American culture too, of an imposed sense of Indian culture as timeless or, you know,
00:33:09
Speaker
I should say, an imposed sense of coming from British colonists of an Indian timelessness.
00:33:15
Speaker
And so this idea that Purchese is ancient is not really very well grounded.
00:33:22
Speaker
And in fact, it seems...
00:33:25
Speaker
the evidence-based suggestion of recent scholarship is that the game is not ancient, but really dates to the 16th century or thereabouts.
00:33:39
Speaker
And then of course it's through colonialism and the cultural appropriations or adoptions of that, of the British presence in India that we do see
00:33:52
Speaker
the game known in Hindi as Parcheesi make its way to Great Britain and then to the United States.
Monopoly's Anticapitalist Origins
00:33:59
Speaker
But it's very interesting to see even a game like that actually is later copyrighted in its American manifestation as Parcheesi, which is not the case with something like chess or checkers, which I will not speak to because I do not know how old those games are.
00:34:19
Speaker
I don't want to hazard a guess, but...
00:34:22
Speaker
um snakes and ladders or in its american version shoots and ladders is another interesting example of a game that originated in india um and uh and uh is adapted in various different ways by by the british and by the americans as well um yeah but that's a classic game of vice and virtue which i think is sort of
00:34:49
Speaker
Sort of horrifying to behold.
00:34:52
Speaker
And it's like a tool for teaching young children the perils of life that you, you know, get lifted up the ladder by your virtues.
00:34:59
Speaker
But then at any moment in time, you can fall back down the chute or the sort of even more terrifying back of the snake if you make a misstep.
00:35:10
Speaker
Seemingly just by chance.
00:35:12
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:35:13
Speaker
Just by chance.
00:35:15
Speaker
It's a very Calvinist sort of game, isn't it?
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:35:21
Speaker
I will just also say something about Monopoly too, I think, if you'd like.
00:35:27
Speaker
Sure.
00:35:28
Speaker
Because I think that's an interesting one too, where its origins have not necessarily always been well known and we think of it as this
00:35:37
Speaker
typical kind of demonstration of American obsession with a correlation between success and wealth.
00:35:44
Speaker
But it actually, again, through a foray into game board studies, it was derived from
00:35:55
Speaker
An educational forerunner that was actually anti-capitalist developed by a woman named Lizzie McGee.
00:36:02
Speaker
I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly.
00:36:05
Speaker
But it was it was intended to to demonstrate the.
00:36:10
Speaker
some of the issues of capitalism in its original form, which was called the landlord's game.
00:36:16
Speaker
And so it was later that it becomes the game that we know, and we do actually have a hand painted version of Monopoly in the exhibition.
The Wendell Collection's Impact on the Museum
00:36:29
Speaker
Well, Emily, I should let you go, but I do want to know just a little bit, if you can tell me, about the history of the collection.
00:36:38
Speaker
You mentioned the Wendells, who was still dead.
00:36:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:44
Speaker
What inspired them to do that?
00:36:48
Speaker
Well, I don't want to speak too much on the Wendells' behalf, and yet I am just in awe of the collection that they have built, which
00:36:59
Speaker
over many, many years, as you can imagine, of pursuing this particular passion.
00:37:05
Speaker
I think they saw an incredible aesthetic power in these boards, which we're really indebted to them for this, because I think that this is not an area that has been
00:37:22
Speaker
fully appreciated for not only its artistic merits, but also for the depth of historical interest that these boards display.
00:37:36
Speaker
I mean, they really offer deep insights into American culture and values, and we can really gain a sense from looking at them of, you know, I should say a mainstream, but nonetheless pervasive strand of
00:37:51
Speaker
interest in competition and adventure at the same time as we have this kind of competing interests of, you know, wanting to stay grounded in Christian values for many and a sense of wanting to uphold moral values, even in this culture that was becoming increasingly fast paced and becoming increasingly open to leisure.
00:38:15
Speaker
But I think
00:38:16
Speaker
leisure with leisure also comes the potential for advice.
00:38:21
Speaker
Actually, I just I have to give you this one quotation because it's so incredible.
00:38:25
Speaker
But
00:38:26
Speaker
There was a late 19th century reformed gambler who is dramatically quoted as saying, the parlor card table is the kindergarten of the gambler's hell.
00:38:38
Speaker
And so I quote that in the show to help interpret some of these examples like this Parcheesi board that is inscribed with
00:38:50
Speaker
the words love God by loving each other.
00:38:53
Speaker
So I think there's this really interesting tension that we see through looking not just at one or two of these boards, but through the major achievement of the Wendells' long years of collecting and bringing together this range of boards that really collectively tells this incredibly engaging component of American history.
00:39:18
Speaker
What's going to happen after the exhibition?
00:39:20
Speaker
What's in the future for these game boards?
00:39:23
Speaker
Well, we're really excited and thrilled that the Wendells have been so generous in making a gift of so many of the boards.
00:39:32
Speaker
And we are looking forward to opportunities to display them in the future.
00:39:41
Speaker
Oh, I should say also we have, there's a wonderful article that I wrote that Americana Insights is publishing in their edition coming out this fall, which will accompany the exhibition.
00:39:50
Speaker
And so for those who want to read more about some of the topics that we've spoken about today, that is a great opportunity if you can't make it to see the show.
Podcast Production Credits
00:40:01
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:40:01
Speaker
And I hope you do get to make it to see the show, which once again opens on September 13th at the American Folk Art Museum, which is right by Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
00:40:14
Speaker
Emily Javalt, thank you so much for joining me.
00:40:17
Speaker
Thank you, Ben.
00:40:17
Speaker
It was delightful.
00:40:20
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
00:40:27
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:40:30
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:40:32
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.