‘This month’s Livingston Library lecture’

     
This month’s lecture at the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library at the Grand Lodge of New York will be hosted Thursday, August 31 at 6:30 p.m. in Masonic Hall (71 W. 23rd Street in Manhattan) on the 14th floor. Photo ID is required to enter the building, but admission to the lecture is free of charge. White wine will be served. Reserve your seat by email here. From the publicity:

Bro. Lajos Kossuth

‘Hungary’s George Washington’

Catherine M. Walter, Curator of the Livingston Masonic Library, will present a lecture focused on the artifacts in the Livingston Masonic Library’s collection that relate to Brother Lajos Kossuth, a Hungarian freedom fighter and Freemason who has been called “Hungary’s Washington.” The artifacts include those involved with the S.S. Kossuth, a Merchant Marine ship built with $4 million of War Bonds raised by New York Freemason Morris Cukor, and a letter in Kossuth’s own hand, written while in prison in Turkey.

She will describe the curatorial process of discovery with the largely unknown collection of the Livingston Masonic Library, and will trace how she regained the Christening Bottle of the S.S. Kossuth, held by the Lasdon Park Veterans Museum in a long-forgotten loan to them.

Ms. Walter has been with the Grand Lodge of New York since 2003 and is responsible for the re-housing, cataloguing, and researching the 50,000-piece artifact collection. She has designed and installed more than 90 exhibits for the 39 exhibit cases found throughout Grand Lodge. She also created the Library’s Virtual Museum, which holds more than 700 artifacts and biographies. Since 2010, her work also includes the copy-editing and production of 11 Grand Lodge books of proceedings.

Her earlier work with museum collections was at the American Museum of Natural History, with the African, Great Basin, and Great Plains Ethnographic Storerooms. When she started at the Livingston Library, she had worked with more than 80,000 artifacts. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from SUNY Geneseo, with study at CUNY Lehman, and at the Université Paul Valery in Montpellier, France. She has worked on archaeological digs in Westchester and Nevada, and has made a photographic survey of 25 Mayan archaeological sites during a solo-voyage through the Yucatan. She is an author of poetry and short stories, and has completed her first novel.