Lecture: "REFASHIONING IDENTITY: Secondhand Clothing in Haiti and the Diaspora"

Please join us for the keynote lecture of the 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association conference.  Free and open to the public!

"REFASHIONING IDENTITY: Secondhand Clothing in Haiti and the Diaspora"
Dr. Hanna Rose Shell, MIT
Friday, April 8, 2011
8:30am Room L160, Conrad A. Elvehjem Building

Description: Clothing is a circulating technology that is also a medium of social transmission: material culture par excellence. This multimedia lecture and film presentation examines "pèpè," or secondhand clothes imported into Haiti from North America.  Recycled clothes wear the traces and bear the burdens of an increasingly global history of American material culture.

 

Dr. Shell is assistant professor at MIT in the Program in Science, Technology and Society, and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.


Sponsored by the University Lectures Committee, Material Culture Focus Group, Art History Department, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology  Department, Art History GradForum, and the Center for Visual Cultures.

"Eating, Cooking, Culture: The Politics and History of Food" April 15-16

Eating, Cooking, Culture: The Politics and History of Food
Hefter Center
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
April 15-16, 2011

For the food scholars, foodies, and others interested in food issues, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is sponsoring a symposium on global foodways Friday and Saturday, April 15-16.  Please see the website below for details:

http://www4.uwm.edu/cie/research/conferences/food/index.html

Adventures in Preservation

Emily Wallrath, a graduate of the program, is currently a graduate student in historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, wants us to know about Adventures in Preservation, a non-profit group that organizes volunteer vacations to rehabilitate historic buildings around the country and world!  In addition to the hands-on work we do restoring the buildings, time is taken to enjoy the local sights, culture and food.  Preservation trips have been done in places like New Mexico Ghana, Illinois, Slovenia and Italy!  

Here's a link to the website: www.adventuresinpreservation.org

If you have any questions, please contact
Emily Wallrath
Adventures in Preservation
1557 North Street
Boulder, CO 80304 USA
(303) 444-0128

Lecture: "The Traditional Arts of Wisconsin's Industrial Workers"

The Traditional Arts of Wisconsin's Industrial Workers Please join us for an illustrated talk by University of Wisconsin-Madison folklorist Jim Leary this Sunday, March 27, at 1:30 pm in the James Watrous Gallery, located in the Overture Center for the Arts, located at 201 State Street. This free talk is in conjunction with the photography exhibition Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait. Wisconsin's culturally diverse industrial workforce has included many practitioners of traditional arts who have used job site skills, scraps, experiences, and downtime to fashion carvings, fabrics, musical instruments, sculptures, songs, stories, and more.  Although the creations of these folk artists sometimes evoke their particular occupations as factory and construction workers, they often conjure an ethnically homogeneous, rural, handmade, holistic, largely bygone world contrasting markedly with their cosmopolitan, urban, mechanical, fragmented, contemporary surroundings.  Folklorist Jim Leary will offer an illustrated presentation on the significance of such industrial workers and traditional artists as a Ho-Chunk ironworker adept at bridge construction who relies on metalwork skills to make German Silver jewelry, an African American industrial seamstress who transforms scraps from hemmed pants into quilts, a Serbian immigrant crane operator who carves black walnut miniatures of his Old Country peasant village, and a Hmong weaver of bamboo baskets who finds a new medium in plastic strapping castoff from pallet loads.

Public Lecture and Panel Discussion: "Displaying Race: Material Culture, White Identities, and the Postwar House"

Please join the Center for Visual Cultures for a public lecture and panel discussion with Dianne Harris Professor of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   Public Lecture: "Displaying Race: Material Culture, White Identities, and the Postwar House" Monday, March 28, 2011 5:30 PM Location: Chazen Museum of Art Room L140 This lecture demonstrates the ways in which the owners and occupants of ordinary postwar houses in the United States (1945-60) used the consumption and display of household objects as a means to confirm their purchase of white, middle-class, American identities. Individuals and families construct and reveal their identities through artifacts purchased for and displayed in the home in an ongoing process that changes as they try out different notions of the self that are nonetheless contained within specific parameters of race, class, and gender. Possessing and carefully displaying the right items helped to ameliorate the homogeneous monotony of hones in some suburban developments--a homogeneity that could be associated with images of the non-white and lower classes. But consumer goods were also a crucial measure of distinction among a group that was newly upwardly mobile, newly affluent, perhaps even newly "white." Material goods then, helped affirm class and race and became especially important to those whose identities were in flux as they moved from dwellings shared with immigrant parents into homes of their own, and in the process, forged new identities. Storage also became a carefully calculated matter that balanced what had to be concealed with what best served the family through being revealed. Built-in storage and cabinetry assumed new significance in ordinary postwar houses since a closed cabinet implies capacity and occupation by goods that are simultaneously well-managed. I will therefore examine some postwar habits of consumption and the ways houses changed to accommodate the new goods that carried specific symbolic meanings for Americans who sought to confirm their racial and class identities in the postwar era.   Panel Discussion: "History and Fate of the Postwar American Suburb" Monday, March 28, 2011 10:00 am to 12:00 noon Location: Memorial Library Room 126 (West Corridor), 728 State Street Participants include: --Dianne Harris, Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History; Director, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign --Arnold R. Alanen, Professor Emeritus, Department of Landscape Architecture --Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program --Kurt Paulsen, Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning --Brad Murphy, Director, Planning Division, City of Madison --Daina Penkiunas, National Register Coordinator, Division of Historic Preservation, Wisconsin Historical Society Description: So-called suburban studies is a hot topic of late in academic scholarship; recent books on Levittown and other postwar landscapes are coming out in abundance. Historic preservationists are wrestling with whether or not and how to preserve these landscapes, just as planners and developers are trying, in various ways, to consider the future of postwar suburban spaces as they built "new urbanist" communities in and near postwar developments. This panel examines the state of the "postwar American suburb" as a topic for study as well as a physical reality. Panelists will come at this topic from a number of perspectives, and consider both practical and theoretical questions. Discussion topics will include: --How has scholarship on postwar suburbia changed over the past 60 years? --How has recent scholarship on this topic challenged prevailing ideas of the postwar house? The postwar suburb? Urban sprawl? --What kinds of questions are historians exploring now in postwar suburbia and why? --What has been the impact of the so-called "new urbanism" and "sustainable design" on postwar suburbs and the buildings within them? --How has recent popular interest in "mid-century modern" design affected the ideas about postwar suburbia? --How are preservation regulations and/or urban planning laws favoring (or not) the preservation or redevelopment of these spaces? Presented with funding from the Mellon Foundation/UW Center for the Humanities and in conjunction with Illuminate: Year of the Arts. Professor Harris's visit is also co-sponsored by the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program, the Material Culture Program, the Design Studies Department, the Department of Art History, and the Visual Cultures Student Focus Group.

Public Lecture: "The Builder's Wright: Marshall Erdman, 'Wrightification' and Regional Modernism in Madison, WI"

"The Builder's Wright: Marshall Erdman, 'Wrightification' and Regional Modernism in Madison, WI"
Friday April 1, 2011
5:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building

Love 'em or hate 'em,  suburbs and suburbia are very much apart of American consciousness and culture.  Material Culture core faculty member Anna Andrzejewski will be giving this semester's Friends of Art talk on her current book project that centers on Marshall Erdman, a Madison-based builder, who incorporated Frank Lloyd Wright's design concepts into his suburban residential and commercial projects. 

It's A Material World Indeed: Website Spotlight

Gianofer Fields is the creator of a new website called It's a Material World, dedicated to connecting professors, designers, and students.  In her words, "Material Culture is living Anthropology.  It's an opportunity to examine the objects we keep near to us, while we are still alive to enjoy the conversation.  itsamaterialworld.org is a website that brings these conversations to life.  It's a virtual exhibit, a multi-media exploration of the everyday and evocative objects which fill our lives."  Fields  investigates ordinary objects, researching them and interviewing others on the object's cultural significance.  She has completed two so far, one centering on the valentine and another focusing on a death doll.    

gianofer@itsamaterialworld.org

www.itsamaterialworld.org

This project grew out of classes taken with the Material Culture Program and out of Fields' long career in radio, where she worked as an arts and culture reporter and correspondent for Chicago's National Public Radio affiliate stations.  In 2007, she won the Chicago Headline Club's Peter Lisagor Award for exemplary journalism with a piece on Mary Todd Lincoln.  Gianofer currently works as an independent arts and culture producer and correspondent, writing and producing both long and short segments for Wisconsin Public Radio.  In addition to local segments, she has partnered with the British Broadcasting Corporation, doing field recordings and interviews for Americana, a show on contemporary American life.    

Blog Profile: Yummy Furniture and Design

Yummy Furniture and Design is the name of both Theresa Haffner-Stearns' interior design firm and her blog, where she is currently documenting a Chippendale-style ribbon back armchair discovered in Ft. Atkinson, WI. The chair is part of her personal collection of antique furniture, of which an Empire piece was selected for appraisal by Antiques Road Show.  She incorporates a lot of information about the history of the Chippendale style and its features, but she also includes many images, which is always a plus for blog readers.  Her images include not only photographs but drawings that she has made of the chair, as well as images from Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director.

 

theresamhs@sbcglobal.net 

http://yummyfurnitureanddesign.blogspot.com/

Haffner-Stearns is a lover of residential interior design and a life-long student of material culture.  A Philadelphia native and Allied Member of the American Society of Interior Designers, she received her BS in Design Studies from the UW- Madison in 2008, being awarded two scholarships, receiving academic honors and interning at the Mt. Horeb Historical society. She remains an active member of the Material Culture Focus Group at the University.

As a successful entrepreneur in the greater Philadelphia area she owned and operated two antique stores and a restoration/design studio to the trade and public. Since relocating to Wisconsin in 2000, she has also been the design and operations manager at a fine furniture and bedding start-up, designing numerous pieces of furniture and coordinating accessory lines.  Her design specialty is upholstery restoration.

Public Lecture: "Textile Salvage," April 8, 2011

Friday, April 8, 2011

8:30-9:30am

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L160

Dr. Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor in The Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, will be the keynote speaker at the 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association annual conference, being held April 7-10, 2011.  Please come to what is sure to be a facscinating and timely talk.  Below is an abstract of the lecture:

"Clothing, almost by definition, is a circulating technology that is also a medium of social transmission: material culture par excellence. It is both the means and the site for storage and the spread, and the withholding, of information. Clothes are made to be carried by the human body (as in the French porter and the Haitian Creole pote) as the body moves through space, time and life in the world. From their origins in the first days of human culture and into the twenty-first century, textile skins were portable artifacts and temporary prostheses, material culture shaped by the demands of a mobile body and inscribed with markers of that body’s history. The demands on clothing have always been high – armor (protection against shame, enemies, and the elements) and aesthetics, comfort and durability. The portability of clothing, and its proximity to the human body, means that it is also changeable. Clothes are technologies in continual flux. As this keynote lecture will argue, recycled clothes wear the traces and bear the burdens of an increasingly global history of American material culture." --Hanna Rose Shell

Public Lecture: "The Work of a Rogue Wisconsin Fountain Pen Maker" April 7, 2011

Thursday, April 7, 2011

5:00-6:30pm 

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building L150

Mr. Sorgatz will discuss his process of prototyping and crafting fountain pens from scratch using late nineteenth and early twentieth century designs. He will discuss how he uses modern materials and technologies to create new and innovative based loosely upon the work of pioneering pen makers such as Parker Pen of Janesville, Wisconsin.  He will also discuss the overlap of engineering and handcraft in the lecture and may possibly bring a nineteenth century decorative turning machine to demonstrate. 

For more information, please see an earlier post written by Amy Brabender and Emma Silverman!  This is the first of two public lectures associated with the 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association conference, "The Life of the Object."

Mid-America America Studies Association Annual Conference, April 7-10, 2011

A lot has happened since the last post about the conference.  We've got a complete schedule of events and panels, and more information at the MAASA website!  Our registration form had some problems, but everything is compatible now, so please register.  It's guaranteed to be a good time.  Thanks to everyone who has helped put the conference together!

The Life of the Object:

An Experimental Workshop and Conference on

Production, Consumption, and Creative Reuse in American Culture

Thursday - Sunday, April 7 - 10, 2011

The Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA) Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

(Schedule Subject to Change)

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2011

           

5:00-6:30 PM, Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L150: Pen-Making Talk and Demonstration by Lynn Sorgatz: "The Work Of A Rogue Wisconsin Fountain Pen Maker"

7:00 PM: MAASA Board Members Meet With American Studies Faculty at UW

FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2011

8:30-9:30 AM, Elvehjem L160: Keynote Address/Public Lecture by Dr. Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor at MIT in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows: "Textile Salvage"

9:45-11:30 AM: Concurrent Sessions: Production

SESSION 1: Producing America: Appropriation and Consumption in Twentieth-Century Design

Moderator: Julia Allen, Assistant Professor, Scandinavian Studies

Elvehjem L160

●      “The Making of the Movie Queen Films: When Audience and Subject Are One.”  Kara Fagan, University of Iowa

●      “Made in Scandinavia – Copied in the US: The American Appropriation of Scandinavian Product and Design Culture in the 50s and 60s.”  Jørn Guldberg, University of Southern Denmark at Kolding

●      “You’d Swear They Were Modern: Ruth Reeves, the Index of American Design, and the Canonization of Shaker Material Culture.”  William D. Moore, University of North Carolina-Wilmington

 

SESSION 2: Assemblage

Moderator: Martha Glowacki, Director of the James Watrous Gallery and independent artist

Elvehjem L170

●      “Recovering the Rubble:  Assemblage Art in Los Angeles.”  Paul Von Blum, UCLA

●      “The Lives in the Object: Figural Totems Made with Natural Detritus.”  Beverly Gordon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

●      “Material Evolution: Ugandan Bark Cloth.”  Lesli Robertson, University of North Texas

11:30 AM-12:30 PM: Lunch on Your Own

12:00-1:00 PM: Brown bag lecture with Hanna Rose Shell

12:30-2:15 PM: Concurrent Sessions: Production

SESSION 1: Imagined Materialities

Moderator: Lauren Kroiz, Assistant Professor, Art History and speaker

Elvehjem L140

●      “Farmville: Online Overconsumption, Clutter, Social Connections, Memory and Meaning.”  Mark Nelson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

●      “Harry Potter Scarves and Plushies: Fandom Craft and the Tangible in the Age of the Internet.”  Rebecca Keyel, University of Wisconsin-Madison

●      “Remaking Critique: Michel Gondry’s Sweeding Protocol.”  Benjamin Wiggins, University of Minnesota

SESSION 2:  The Legacy of Work: Technology, Craft, and DIY

Moderator: Kate Smith, Hummel Fellow, Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee

Elvehjem L150

●      “Sew It Yourself: Embroidery in the DIY Movement.”  Malka Salomon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

●      “Garment/Research: A Point of Reference, a Portable System of Investigation and a Tool of Connection.”  Kelly Cobb, University of Delaware

●      “Textiles and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries: Handcraft and Industrial Production in Contemporary and Historical Contexts.”  Amanda Grace Sikarskie, Michigan State University

2:15-2:30 PM: Coffee Break

2:30-6:15 PM, Elvehjem L140: Experimental Workshop: Exploring State Street and Post-Workshop Discussion with Hanna Rose Shell

6:15-7:30 PM, University Club: Reception with Drinks and Light Snacks; Display of Images/Videos from Interactive Event

6:00-9:00 PM: MAASA Board Meeting/Dinner on Your Own For Others

 7:30-9:30 PM: Exhibition Opening Night on Willy Street!  Two exhibits will be available for viewing:

--“The Life of the Object,” Drift Studio, 819 Williamson St.

 “The Life of the Object” Featured Artists:

●      Kelly Cobb, “Garment/Research: A Point of Reference, a Portable System of Investigation and a Tool of Connection.”

●      Peter Fine and Carmen Giménez-Smith, “re-use-niks”

●      James Thurman, “Ancient Art-i-facts of the Early 21st Century”

●      Carole Frances Lung, “Made in Haiti”

--“Present Tense: Push and Pull in Contemporary Ceramics," Midwest Clay Project, 918 Williamson St.

 

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

8:00-8:30 AM, University Club: Continental Breakfast

 8:30-10:15 AM: Concurrent Sessions: Consumption

SESSION 1: Material Negotiation of Social Control

Moderator: TBD

Elvehjem L140

●      “The Tyranny of Bric-a-Brac.”  Lauren Kroiz, University of Wisconsin-Madison

●      “For the Articles: the Cultural War over Braille Playboy.”  Alexis Stevens, University of Iowa

●      “From Artifacts to People Facts: The Archeological Origins of Middle East Area Studies,” Matt Kohlstedt, George Washington University

SESSION 2: Reconsuming Art

Moderator: Sarah Fayen Scarlett, PhD Student, Art History

Elvehjem L150

●      “The Work of Tapestry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”  K. L. H. Wells, University of Southern California

●      “Change for Art: Repackaging Art Experiences through the Art-o-Mat.”  Jennifer Scott, University of North Carolina-Wilmington

●      “The Obsolete Becomes Eternal: the Paint-by-Numbers Fad and Its Reception.”  Stephen Knott, Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum

SESSION 3: (De)constructing Class in Consumption and Design

Moderator: Jane Simonsen, Associate Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies, Augustana College

Elvehjem L160

●      “Consuming Class: How the Media Portrays the Object as Wealth Signifier.”  Simone Serwer, Independent Scholar

●      “The Behavior Objective: Examining the Social Corrective in the Context of Sustainable Consumption.”  Julia Dault, Parsons, The New School for Design

●      “Thrifting: Trash to Treasure in the Goodwill ‘Bins,’” Jen Ayres, Cornell University

10:15-10:30 AM: Coffee Break

10:30-12:15 PM: Concurrent Sessions: Consumption

SESSION 1: Consumer Needs: Past, Present, and Future

Moderator: Mark Nelson, Associate Professor, Design Studies

Elvehjem L140

●      “‘Hemingway Amidst Cheese and Crackers’: Booketerias, Public Culture, and Consumer Capitalism.” Derek Attig, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champagne

●      “The Greed Imperative: The Role of User Needs in Design.”  Prasad Boradkar, Arizona State University

●      “What About Clothing? Exploring Material Culture Theory and Sustainability Issues in Clothing Practices.”  Margarete Ordon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

SESSION 2: Materiality of Sound

Moderator: Stefan Osdene, PhD Student, Art History

Elvehjem L150

●      “Boom! The Anti-Supersonic Flight Movement and the Materiality of Sound.”  Craig Eley, University of Iowa

●      “The Theremin at Home, on Stage and in Cinema.” Kelly Hiser, University of Wisconsin-Madison

●       Jeremy Zima, Sounding and Visualizing Authenticity in Electric Guitar Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison

12:15-1:15 PM: Lunch on Your Own

1:30-3:15 PM: Concurrent Sessions: Reuse

SESSION 1: Reconsuming and Remembering

Moderator: Diane Al Shihabi, PhD Student, Design Studies

Elvehjem L140

●      “Eighteenth-Century Jewelry and the Recycling of Luxury.”  Louisa E. Brouwer, University of Delaware

●      “Remembering Grant Wood’s Veterans Memorial Window.”  Allison Wanger, University of Iowa

●      “Recycled Information: Consumption, Production, and Reuse in The Ethel Index.”  Donald Snyder, University of Maryland-Baltimore

SESSION 2: Creating a Material Past

Moderator: Ann Smart Martin, Professor, Art History

Elvehjem L140

●     “‘Nothing Material Happened’: The Materials of Matter in John Fitch’s Autobiography.”  Ashley Hetrick, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champagne

●     “Making an Alternative Past: Steampunk and Participatory Consumerism.” Sara K. Brunkhorst, University of North Carolina-Wilmington

●     “Creating Stories, Consuming Memories: Western Vacation Scrapbooks, Albums and Slideshows.”  Cinda Nofzinger, University of Iowa

3:15-3:30 PM: Coffee Break

3:30-5:15 PM: Concurrent Sessions: Reuse

SESSION 1: Changing Space, Changing Memory

Moderator: Sissel Schroeder, Professor, Anthropology

Elvehjem L140

●      “Recycling Black Hawk: Ethnic Commodification and the Production of Leisure Space.”  Jane Simonsen, Augustana College

●      TBD

●      “Creating Geodæsia:  Land and Memory.”  Kalie Wetovich, Miami University

SESSION2: Making Meaning and the Life Cycle of Objects

Moderator: Anna Andrzejewski, Associate Professor, Art History

Elvehjem L150

●      “Dismantling the Ivory Tower: The Life and Times of the George L. Mosse Humanities Building.”  Travis Olson, Independent Scholar

●      “Dirty, Rotten Technology: The Social History of Compost in the United States.”  Vanessa Nakoskie, University of Iowa

●      “Driving Downtown: The Standardization of Urban Space and Meaning Making in Kansas City, Missouri.”  Andrea Clark, University of Kansas

6:15-8:15 PM, University Club: Banquet and Closing Address by Ann Smart Martin