by JC Johnson
For thirty years, Nancy Carlisle, Senior Curator of Collections, has been a vital part of Historic New England’s efforts to protect, preserve, and interpret the region’s unique history and how it fits within the cultural story of the United States. Founded in 1910, Historic New England is dedicated to preserving unique structures and significant objects. The organization owns over thirty historic houses, and has collections with over 123,000 objects, and more than a million documents, historical photographs and ephemera. Nancy and other staff members use the collections to create interpretive recreations of New Englanders’ domestic lives from the seventeenth through the twentieth century and illuminate the region’s rich history. Nancy Carlisle has made significant contributions to Historic New England’s mission and her work continues to challenge and excite her.
A New Jersey native with family roots in New England, Nancy visited New England frequently while growing up. Those excursions provided her first look at the unique architecture found across the region and stories those houses might contain. During college, Nancy studied art history and American history. These passions formed the foundation for Nancy’s wide-ranging duties at Historic New England. Still, Nancy claims her main responsibility as a curator is to find ways to share the stories that the collections of historic New England tell about the people who lived here.
Nancy helps oversee the organization’s holdings of historic household objects and artifacts. She also works to locate and acquire new objects for the collections which appropriately augment existing holdings. Nancy also collaborates with her colleagues to create exhibitions in the organization’s historic houses using objects and furnishings in order to provide insight into four hundred years of life in New England. This process requires Nancy to visit houses with colleagues, sometimes using archival photos and records as reference points to assess the site and plan their work. Some site interpretations dress an entire house to represent a single time period, and in other cases, a house’s furnishings may be curated to lead visitors through different eras as they move from room to room.
Nancy is interested in the stories found through examining the objects with which people surrounded themselves. She focuses on the “everyman” and “every object” and does not limit interpreting the past through the words and deeds of “the great man.” Objects and domestic settings inspires Nancy, particularly because, as she relates, much of America’s domestic history is women’s history. In fact, Nancy co-authored the book, America’s Kitchens, with Melinda Talbot Nasardinov. For this book, Nancy chose items from Historic New England’s collection to guide readers through a history of American cooking while examining the evolution of the kitchen’s cultural significance over two hundred years of American domestic life.
Nancy’s proudest accomplishment is “Cherished Possessions: A New England Legacy”, the organization’s first major travelling exhibition, which she curated. Between 2003 and 2005, the exhibition visited museums from Maine to Hawaii. The well-reviewed exhibition featured significant objects from four centuries of New England life which provided entry points to understanding the people who valued those items. Nancy also wrote the accompanying exhibition catalog detailing the items and the stories they tell.
Nancy leads small tours at Historic New England sites, including the main facility in Haverhill, and she speaks at other regional cultural organizations. She enjoys these regular opportunities to interact with people across New England. Her outreach work also entails writing articles for Historic New England magazine and other antiques and fine arts publications. One recent article examines two earthenware pots linked to two remarkable New England women centuries apart. Lastly, Nancy’s work involves fundraising activities like researching and applying for project grants. When project funding comes through, as it did for the restoration of Quincy House, in Quincy, Massachusetts, Nancy thrills that a sleepy house returns to life to tell its story. She happily reports that Quincy residents embraced the project, and the restored house helped enhance civic pride for the town’s past and present.
Nancy Carlisle plays many vital roles at Historic New England. She enjoys them all. Examining objects and interpreting the stories that they tell about people is one of the great rewards that she takes from her work. That mission remains a driving motivation and fits well with the mission of Historic New England. In fact, when she has compared other institutions to her own, Nancy readily admits that Historic New England is exactly the right place for her.