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A lively exploration of eclecticism, playfulness, and whimsy in American postwar design, including architecture, graphic design, and product design This spirited volume shows how postwar designers embraced whimsy and eclecticism in their work, exploring playfulness as an essential construct of modernity. Following World War II, Americans began accumulating more and more goods, spurring a transformation in the field of interior decoration. Storage walls became ubiquitous, often serving as a home's centerpiece. Designers such as Alexander Girard encouraged homeowners to populate their new shelving units with folk art, as well as unconventional and modern objects, to produce innovative and unex...
A history of how Danish design rose to prominence in the postwar United States, becoming shorthand for stylish modern comfort. Today, Danish Modern design is synonymous with clean, midcentury cool. During the 1950s and ‘60s, it flourished as the furniture choice for Americans who hoped to signal they were current and chic. But how did this happen? How did Danish Modern become the design movement of the times? In The Chieftain and the Chair, Maggie Taft tells the tale of our love affair with Danish Modern design. Structured as a biography of two iconic chairs—Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair and Hans Wegner’s Round Chair, both designed and first fabricated in 1949—this book follows the c...
Ten beautifully illustrated essays tell the stories of handcrafted objects and their makers, providing inspiration and insight into Black history and craftsmanship. Black artisans have long been central to American art and design, creating innovative and highly desired work against immense odds. Atlanta-based chairmaker and scholar Robell Awake explores the stories behind ten cornerstones of Black craft, including: The celebrated wooden chairs of Richard Poynor, an enslaved craftsman who began a dynasty of Tennessee chairmakers. The elegant wrought-iron gates of Philip Simmons, seen to this day throughout Charleston, South Carolina, whose work features motifs from the Low Country. The invent...
" Food has always been an important source of knowledge about culture and society. Art and Appetite takes a fascinating new look at depictions of food in American art, demonstrating that the artists' representations of edibles offer thoughtful reflection on the cultural, political, economic, and social moments in which they were created. Using food as an emblem, artists were able to both celebrate and critique their society, expressing ideas relating to politics, race, class, gender, and commerce. Focusing on the late 18th century through the Pop artists of the 20th century, this lively publication investigates the many meanings and interpretations of eating in America. Richly illustrated, A...
In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969 traces the first two decades of the Haystack Mountain School of Craft’s history and its pivotal impact on the world of art and craft practice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. The first scholarly investigation of this internationally renowned school, the exhibition, and the accompanying catalogue will feature work made at Haystack or influenced by time spent there by some of the most highly recognized names in the fields of fiber, glass, ceramics, jewelry, and graphic arts to demonstrate the school’s significant role in debates about art, craft, industry, and pedagogy in the United States during the 195...
How ecological design emerged in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s, building on both Scandinavia’s design culture and its environmental movement. Scandinavia is famous for its design culture, and for its pioneering efforts toward a sustainable future. In Ecological by Design, Kjetil Fallan shows how these two forces came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Scandinavian designers began to question the endless cycle in which designed objects are produced, consumed, discarded, and replaced in quick succession. The emergence of ecological design in Scandinavia at the height of the popular environmental movement, Fallan suggests, illuminates a little-known reciprocity between ...
An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode o...
A reckoning of the central role of enslaved and free Black potters in the long-standing stoneware traditions of Edgefield, South Carolina Recentering the development of industrially scaled Southern pottery traditions around enslaved and free Black potters working in the mid-nineteenth century, this catalogue presents groundbreaking scholarship and new perspectives on stoneware made in Edgefield, South Carolina. Among the remarkable works included are a selection of regional face vessels as well as masterpieces by enslaved potter and poet David Drake, who signed, dated, and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time. Essays on the production, collection, dispersal, and reception of stoneware from Edgefield offer a critical look at what it means to collect, exhibit, and interpret objects made by enslaved artisans. Several featured contemporary works inspired by or related to Edgefield stoneware attest to the cultural and historical significance of this body of work, and an interview with acclaimed contemporary artist Simone Leigh illuminates its continued relevance.
Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany's (American, 1848-1933) extraordinary country estate in Oyster Bay, New York, completed in 1905, was the epitome of Tiffany's achievement and in many ways defined this multifaceted artist. Tiffany designed every aspect of the project inside and out, creating a total aesthetic environment. This publication accompanies an exhibition that reveals Tiffany's most personal art, bringing into focus this remarkable artist who lavished as much care and creativity on the design and furnishing of his home and gardens as he did on all the wide-ranging media in which he worked. Although the house tragically burned to the ground in 1957, many of its surviving architectural elements and interior characteristics are included in this volume. Also featured are Tiffany's personal collections of his own work-breathtaking stained-glass windows, paintings, glass and ceramic vases-as well as the artist's collections of Japanese, Chinese, and Native American works of art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
This book depicts a group of Chicago patrons who sought to shape the city's identity and foster a uniquely American style, by supporting local artists who depicted the West.