Lotta Dames, No Horses: The Life, Death, and Legacy of John Latouche at Hammond Castle Museum [05/28/24]

Step into a world of creativity and exploration with our thought-provoking series:

Image, Invention, and Imagination: A Series on Art & Community Through the Ages.

Mondays, May 6, 13, 20 & Tuesday, May 28th

7:00 pm to 8:30 pm. Doors open at 6:45 pm

Admission: $15 per presentation / $50 for series.

Member savings apply.

Tuesday, May 28:

Lotta Dames, No Horses: The Life, Death, and Legacy of John Latouche

Presented by: Caleb McMurphy, Director of Visitor Services & Education at Hammond Castle Museum.

On July 7th 1956, the librettist John Treville Latouche’s seminal American Opera The Ballad of Baby Doe premiered in Central City, Colorado. “It’s about love and It’s about money,” Latouche had joked, in predicting the public’s response to the Opera, “And there’s no combination an American audience likes more!” Today, The Ballad of Baby Doe is often cited as one of the most significant Operas in the American canon, but Latouche would never know just how right he had been. One month later, John Latouche was dead. He was 41. Over the course of his short years, Latouche lived a remarkably dynamic life; like a brilliant star, he pulled some of the most important artistic figures of 20th-century American culture into his brief orbit. The story of the community which Latouche anchored is one that features well-known characters such as composer Leonard Bernstein and artist Marcel Duchamp and local figures like Margarett McKean and Hammond Castle Museum’s own John Hays Hammond Jr.

In fact, through Latouche’s legacy, a curious assembly of artists, poets, and occultists, many of them Queer, came to assemble at Hammond Castle Museum in its founder’s final years. This is a story about the life of John Latouche, but it is also a story about love. About money. About art. About magick. About false accusations of murder, and more. This lecture, the final in Hammond Castle Museum’s May Series on Art & Community Through the Ages, will also serve as an introduction to Hammond Castle Museum’s June Pride Month programming.

Each hour-and-a-half presentation will include a Q&A session with light refreshments available for purchase. The series includes:

Monday, May 6: 140 Years of Television Technology. Presented by: John Leysath, Curatorial Director, Hammond Castle Museum
Monday, May 13: Science and Spirit in Italian Renaissance Painting. Presented by: Rocco Gangle, Philosophy Professor, Endicott College
Monday, May 20: Witches and Wards: Magic and Counter Magic in 17th Century England and New England. Presented by: Krystina Yeager, Founder, Historians Guide To the Salem Witch Trials Tours

Lotta Dames, No Horses: The Life, Death, and Legacy of John Latouche at Hammond Castle Museum

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