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.