Do you miss your mother? Has it been a while since you've been home, since you've chilled with that woman who gave you life, since you were treated to a good home-cooked meal? Well, even though Momma may be a few hundred miles away, you won't have to look very far over the next few months to find a pretty good substitute. At any given point between now and next February there will be scores, if not hundreds, of well-meaning women in their 40s and 50s feeling warm-hearted and nostalgic while visiting South Boston's John F Kennedy Library and Museum. Swing by and you're sure to get a hug or two and, maybe if you're lucky, someone will pinch your cheek.
What occasion could draw so many folks from such a discrete demographic pocket? Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years, an exhibition running through Feb. 28, 2002 is a veritable cornucopia of history-heavy, nostalgic knickknacks, treasure chest treats, and musty memories. It might make your mother swoon, but for those of us born after the Bicentennial, the presentation might evoke a different emotion.
Go for the interesting artifacts forever frozen into our minds from history books and television retrospectives. Witness the collision of culture and politics, borderlines, and hemlines. The expansive exhibition focuses primarily on the dresses that made Jacqueline Kennedy, the icon and the leader who, from the White House of the early '60s, led our nation out of the artistic and social shackles of the conservative '50s.
A mere 31 years old when she moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Kennedy used fashion and style as a signifier. This was a new world, and we would be led through it by a young politician with a thick Boston accent and an even younger woman with an affinity for the latest and finest French fashions.
The exhibition uses some of her finest dresses as the mile-markers along the highway of her husband's administration. Positioned carefully on tastefully opaque mannequins eerily reminiscent of the woman herself, the dresses represent the sharpest and most creative women's fashion worn at home and abroad. But this is no simple, frenzied fashion show frozen in time, the photographers' flash bulbs long since dimmed by history. Interior designs, aged documents, sketches, photos, and video are among the accessories that bring life to the exhibition. Watch footage from her voyages to India and Mexico (she wore high heels while riding an elephant!), or examine the seating charts from the impressive cultural celebrations organized by the First Lady and wonder at so much artistic talent in one room. It is no wonder all those women fill room after room gazing upon still displays of the woman's grandeur. They admire and love her. They want to be her.
The JFK Library and Museum in a majestic I.M. Pei-designed structure features a permanent exhibition about the 35th President, his life, and work. Accessible via the Red Line, the museum sits quietly near UMass Boston's campus on the southern shore offering a majestic view of the city skyline that might rival that from Tisch Library's roof. Call 1-877-616-4599 for more information.
