Richard M. Candee

Richard M. Candee directed Boston University’s Preservation Studies Program for 30 years (1983–2004) and is a professor emeritus of American and New England Studies. At the Preservation Studies Program he coordinated the MA in Preservation and co-directed the JD/MA in Law and Preservation.

From 1969 to 1976, as architectural historian at Old Sturbridge Village, he created a regional survey of New England textile mills and their villages. After 1976 he served as a private preservation consultant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery, Maine for tax-act preservation projects and numerous architectural surveys of neighborhoods and communities in New Hampshire. He is the author of Atlantic Heights: A World War I Shipbuilder’s Community (Portsmouth Marine Soc., 1985; reprint ed., Portsmouth Marine Soc., 2012) and numerous articles and essays.

He served as a Trustee of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities; Essex Institute, Peabody Essex Museum; Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife; Committee for a New England Bibliography. He was a national officer of the Society for Industrial Archeology (1971–1976), Vernacular Architecture Forum (1980–1994), and Preservation Action (1976–1991). He was elected President of the Portsmouth Athenaeum (1980–1985), Chair of the Warner House Association (1993–1996), and an officer of the Portsmouth Historical Society (2005–2023). The Historical Society absorbed two smaller nonprofits under his leadership: The Portsmouth Marine Society Press and Portsmouth Advocates, the local preservation non-profit advocacy group. An officer or trustee of the Portsmouth Historical Society from 2004-2024, he curated or co-curated over a dozen exhibitions there and several more at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

As President of the Vernacular Architecture Forum in 1992 he organized a tour of the city for which he edited Building Portsmouth: The Neighborhoods and Architecture of New Hampshire’s Oldest City now in its third printing. He has been awarded Lifetime Achievement Awards in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for his service to the field, and recognized by many organizations in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

A senior fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History led to a 1999–2000 traveling exhibition on nineteenth century invention, a book on American invention of hand-cranked knitting machinery and multiple journal articles.

He also has organized exhibits and published on several local artists. In 2002 he was the curator of an exhibition The Artful Life of Thomas P. Moses (1808–1881) at the Portsmouth Athenaeum and co-curated with Robert Chase, Nancy Lyon, Weaving The New Hampshire Landscape and Omer T. Lassonde, New Hampshire Modernist (both 2013) and a seventy-fifth anniversary show honoring the New Hampshire Art Association and League of New Hampshire Craftsmen in 2015. In 2008 he organized two exhibitions, Russell Cheney, Paintings of Northern New England 1910–1945 and The Art of the Domestic: Kittery and Southern Maine with a symposium on that American artist and his contemporaries. He compiles a Russell Cheney (1881–1945) catalog raisonné and helps maintain the Russell Cheney website. With former BU graduate student Kevin D. Murphy, now of Vanderbilt University, he helped organize a 2024 exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art on Cheney’s work as a modernist after moving to Maine.