Interview with Tripp Evans

Tripp specializes in American art and architecture, with a focus on the material culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He received his B.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University. He is the author of three books, and in 2010 won the National Award for Arts Writing. His most recent book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), focuses on the role of the American house museum, as seen through four historic homes in New England. He has served on the Boards of the Providence Preservation Society and the Providence Athenaeum, and in 2017 he was appointed to the Rhode Island State Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. He resides on Providence's West Side.

1. You have a new book coming out and exhibit opening this month in conjunction with Historic New England titled The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home. What interested you in this topic and the stories of these men?

Having spent my childhood in generic military housing, I’ve always found the generational histories of old homes special, even exotic. My academic career has focused on American material culture – the ways objects and architectural fabric reveal human stories – and with these four homes, I found a gold mine. The project began with Charles Gibson, who believed his Boston home could forever enshrine his literary reputation and even his own youth; not long after I started to explore his world, I found similarly compelling stories of three other New England bachelor-curators. All four of these men believed, in different ways, that to preserve the past was to preserve their very selfhood. And they were right.

2. What do you hope visitors learn from the experience?

Whether someone reads the book or visits the show (preferably both!), I hope they will come away with a deeper understanding of “home-making” as a devotional activity. This is precisely how Oscar Wilde envisioned domestic design, and these four men – whose lives spanned the Gilded to the Jazz age – were very much Wilde’s acolytes. As single men who represented the last branch of their family trees, my subjects poured their hearts and souls into collecting, preservation, and the (then-new) field of professional interior decoration. They laid the groundwork, in many ways, for the popularity of DIY projects and HGTV home-makeover shows of our own time.

3. What did you find most surprising as you researched these men's stories?

What really struck me is the dazzling range of the men’s visual strategies, despite the potentially leveling influence of their shared period, region, sexuality, and class. These men defied the stereotype of the precious “gay interior decorator,” a caricature that was already well in place in their day. Their homes are as thoughtful as they are beautiful. Charles Pendleton and Ogden Codman, in very different ways, sought to recreate the eighteenth century as a kind of historic stage set for their lives; Charles Gibson and Henry Davis Sleeper took a far more eclectic historical approach, motivated in large part by love (Gibson, for himself – and Sleeper, for his charismatic next-door neighbor).

4. How can historic house museums be activated to be valued by current and future generations?

One of the most effective strategies is to invite a contemporary artist to respond to a house museum’s historic spaces. In fact, it was just such an “intervention,” as these commissions are often called, that first drew me into this project: Hannah Barrett’s marvelous series, Tales from the House of Gibson, a collection of imagined portraits that debuted at the Gibson House Museum in 2010 (one of which will hang in my show). Allowing a historic house to engage in contemporary conversation – whether through curation, programming, or even a bit of theater – keeps these spaces from becoming frozen in amber.

5. What is one of your favorite historic spaces in Rhode Island. Why?

Perhaps surprisingly, my favorite historic space in Rhode Island is not a house. When I walk into the Providence Athenaeum, I am always struck by the way its history feels palpably ever-present. Its Greek Revival reading room could easily be read as a charming historical artifact, if it weren’t for the books that determine its layout. Here you’re surrounded by writers (and busts of writers) that span from Classical antiquity to last week, an atmosphere that physically surrounds you with their voices. It’s a place that reminds us, as William Faulkner famously said, “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”