The Most Magnificent Playground in the World

In 1891, the new Madison Square Garden Tower was dramatically unveiled in a blaze of electric lights and fireworks that stunned and excited the throngs of people that crowded the streets to see the remarkable 18-foot high nude sculpture of Diana at its pinnacle. Architect Stanford White and his friend and collaborator the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had created a palace for pleasure, sport, arts, merrymaking, and make-believe that captured the imagination of New York’s Gilded Age. Join author Suzanne Hinman for an illustrated book talk on her new publication, The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal & Architecture in Gilded Age New York, when she will discuss how both men pushed the boundaries of America’s parochial aesthetic, ushering in an era of art that embraced European styles with American vitality and created a playground for New York’s decadent era.

Suzanne Hinman holds a Ph.D. in American art history and has been a curator, gallerist, museum director, and professor. She served as director of galleries at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the world’s largest art school, as well as owned a private art gallery in Santa Fe. Her interest in the artists and architects of the American Gilded Age and the famed Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire grew while associate director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.