A celebration of the many contributions of women designers to 20th-century American culture. Encompassing work in fields ranging from textiles and ceramics to furniture and fashion, it features the achievements of women of various ethnic and cultural groups, including both famous designers (Ray Eames, Florence Knoll and Donna Karan) and their less well-known sisters.
Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.
Design History Beyond the Canon subverts hierarchies of taste which have dominated traditional narratives of design history. The book explores a diverse selection of objects, spaces and media, ranging from high design to mass-produced and mass-marketed objects, as well as counter-cultural and sub-cultural material. The authors' research highlights the often marginalised role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice. The book is organised in three thematic sections: Consumers, Intermediaries and Designers. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy. The essays in all three sections utilise different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. Design History Beyond the Canon brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.
Domestic advice literature is rich in information about design, ideals of domesticity, consumption and issues of identity, yet this literature remains a relatively neglected resource in comparison with magazines and film. Design at Home brings together etiquette, homemaking and home decoration advice as sources in the first systematic demonstration of the historical value of domestic advice literature as a genre of word and image, and a discourse of dominance. This book traces a transatlantic domestic dialogue between the UK and the US as the chapters explore issues of design, domesticity, consumption, social interaction and identity markers including class, gender and age. Areas covered include: • the use of domestic advice by historians • relationships between advice, housing and the middle class • links between advice and gender • advice and the teenage consumer Design at Home is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural and social history, design history, and cultural studies.
This book explores the beginnings of the interior design profession in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources, from collecting and advice manuals to pattern books and department store catalogues, it demonstrates how new forms of print media were used to ‘sell’ the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, the book establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.
Art Nouveau presents a new overview of the international Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau represented the search for a new style for a new age, a sense that the conditions of modernity called for fundamentally new means of expression. Art Nouveau emerged in a world transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation and increasingly rapid means of transnational exchange, bringing about new ways of living, working and creating. This book is structured around key themes for understanding the contexts behind Art Nouveau, including new materials and technologies, colonialism and imperialism, the rise of the 'modern woman', the rise of the professional designer and the role of the patron-collector. It also explores the new ideas that inspired Art Nouveau: nature and the natural sciences, world arts and world religions, psychology and new visions for the modern self. Ashby explores the movement through 41 case studies of artists and designers, buildings, interiors, paintings, graphic arts, glass, ceramics and jewellery, drawn from a wide range of countries.
What was different about the environments that women created as architects, designers and clients at a time when they were gaining increasing political and social status in a male world? Through a series of case studies, Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, examines in detail the professional and domestic spaces created by women who had money and the opportunity to achieve their ideal. Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities. It offers new information and new interpretations in the study of gender, material culture and the built environment in the period 1860-1960.
Through a close look at the history of the modernist hooked rug, this book raises important questions about the broader history of American modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. Although hooked rugs are not generally associated with the avant-garde, this study demonstrates that they were a significant part of the artistic production of many artists engaged in modernist experimentation. Cynthia Fowler discusses the efforts of Ralph Pearson and of Zoltan and Rosa Hecht to establish modernist hooked rug industries in the 1920s, uncovering a previously undocumented history. The book includes a consideration of the rural workers used to create the modernist narrative of the hooked rug, as cottage industries were established throughout the rural Northeast and South to serve the ever increasing demand for hooked rugs by urban consumers. Fowler closely examines institutional enterprises that highlighted and engaged the modernist hooked rugs, such as key exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1930s and '40s. This study reveals the fluidity of boundaries among art, craft and design, and the profound efforts of a devoted group of modernists to introduce the general public to the value of modern art.
