Author Talk with Alice T. Friedman

“Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York”

Join Queer History Boston for an illuminating evening with art historian Alice T. Friedman, as she takes us inside the glittering, queer avant-garde of the 1920s and ’30s — a world where modern art, jazz, and queer identity collided in dazzling style.

Based on her new book Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York, Friedman resurrects the remarkable story of Max Ewing (1903–1934): musician, photographer, bon vivant, and the connective tissue linking some of the era’s most fascinating artistic circles. Through his photographs and letters, we meet a constellation of figures — Gertrude Stein, Paul Robeson, Isamu Noguchi, Berenice Abbott, and more — all moving through a vibrant, interracial, and unapologetically queer creative world that pulsed across New York, Paris, and Venice before fading with the Depression.

Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American Art at Wellesley College and founding codirector of its Architecture Program. Her books include American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture and Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Cultural History.