CFP: Material Culture Area of ACA/PCA

The Material Culture Area of PCA/ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the 2011 National Conference, to be held in San Antonio, Texas, Wednesday, April 20 - Saturday, April 23. You are invited to submit proposals now through December 15, 2010.


Material Culture Area
The study of material culture offers an exciting area for interdisciplinary research and conversation, as it brings together those engaged in scholarly inquiry in areas as diverse as history, art history, design, decorative arts, cultural studies, consumer studies, literature, communications, anthropology, and sociology. If your work touches on the study of designed objects and consumer goods, we would love to learn more about it at this year's conference in San Antonio. Academics, practitioners, graduate students, museum professionals, and public historians are welcome.

Past presentations in this area have focused on decorative arts and the construction of literary characters, the material culture of poverty, commemorative items, historic and modern furnishings and fashion, branding and marketing trends, and a wide range of associated topics, if you think your work might fit in the material culture area, we encourage you to send an abstract.

Selected works may be published in an edited volume after presentation.


Submission Guidelines:
If you are interested in presenting, or have any questions, please send an abstract of between 150-350 words to:

Dr. Alex Bitterman
School of Design
Rochester Institute of Technology
3404 Booth Hall
73 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623-5603
alexbitterman@gmail.com


Deadline for submission:  Midnight EST, December 15, 2010.

Public Lecture: "Wax Coral and Woolen Pac-Men: The Domestic Handicraft Paradigm, 1810-2010"

Dec. 2, 2010 4pm 7191 Helen C. White Hall "Wax Coral and Woolen Pac-Men: The Domestic Handicraft Paradigm, 1810-2010" Amateur domestic handicraft had become an enormously popular hobby by the middle of the nineteenth century. Women pasted shells on boxes, formed wax flowers, designed scrap screens, cut cardboard into workbaskets, sewed fish scales to silk, twisted wire, spattered ink over ferns, stuffed birds. Through close readings of Victorian craft discourse, this talk analyzes the way women articulated their cultural concerns through handicraft. Domestic handicraft gave women a way to articulate their own modernity and industrial prowess, while simultaneously critiquing the modern financial world in which they lived. The talk concludes by explaining how the core values of contemporary craft actually update ideas first articulated by the Victorians. Talia Schaffer is an associate professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001); co-editor with Kathy A. Psomiades of Women and British Aestheticism (1999); editor of Lucas Malet's 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and editor of Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006).  Novel Craft: Fiction and the Victorian Domestic Handicraft (Oxford, forthcoming), is about the history of amateur handicraft and codes of aesthetic and economic representation in the mid-Victorian novel. She has published widely on noncanonical women writers, material culture, popular fiction, aestheticism, and late-Victorian texts.

New Course for Spring 2011!!!

Kate Smith, visiting post-doc fellow at the Chipstone Foundation, will be teaching a course next semester on 18th century British design:

Art History 565:

The Idea of Design in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century

Prof. Kate Smith

Rm. 166, Elvehjem Building (Chazen)

Thursday, 2:00-4:00

Course Description

This course explores “design” as a process, a concept and a form of technology in the context of eighteenth-century Britain. As well as surveying different design styles, this course also interrogates the idea of design as a system of knowledge and a technology of thinking.

Overview

This course explores “design” as a process, a concept and a form of technology. Beginning with an analysis of design in terms of “style” and aesthetics, this course goes on to examine design in the context of eighteenth-century Britain, a context dominated by a new focus on economy, science and the dissemination of knowledge, to view its impact on society and culture at large. It interrogates the idea of design as a system of knowledge and a technology of thinking to assess how the professionalization of design and its increasingly widespread practice affected systems of thought.

The course will teach students to use and interrogate a variety of primary sources including objects, source books, pattern books, drawing books, correspondence and accounts. Students will particularly benefit from first hand interaction with the Chipstone Foundation collection in Milwaukee as part of the course. The course materials also draw on a wide selection of secondary readings covering the work of scholars of eighteenth-century Britain, design studies, material culture, economics, technology and visual culture.

Photos from Charles Hummel's Visit

One page of the many Dominy shop records, now in the ownership of Winterthur Museum and Garden, Winterthur, DE.

Patterns used for table legs, and turned pieces.

Bedsteads made by the Dominys.

The best sort of scholarship: written records to go along with objects!

A carving tool with decorative scroll work on the blade.

A Visit from Charles Hummel

Charles Hummel, a retired curator at Winterthur Garden and Museum, gave a public talk on the Dominy family workshops on November 9 and was the guest speaker the following day in Prof. Martin's Early American Decorative Arts Class.  The Dominys owned a woodworking and clock shop in East Hampton, New York, from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s.  For the audience's viewing pleasure, here is a clip of Dr. Hummel answering a question that Theresa Haffner-Stearns has about chair legs.

Lynn Sorgatz, The Pen Dude; Guest Post by Emma Silverman and Amy Brabender

Lynn Sorgatz in his workshop.

Lynn displays some of his handiwork.

Lynn Sorgtatz's studio: in the foreground, cellulose acetate pen bodies, in the background, some of the machines Lynn uses to make them.

Emma and Amy listen attentively about Lynn's process.

An example of Lynn Sorgatz's work- a pen made of ivory-like cellulose acetate and pearl.

Another example of Lynn Sorgatz's work- his patented Triad pen made of cellulose acetate.

A colorful display of raw materials used for pen bodies: cellulose acetate, celluloid, hard rubber, and acrylic.

Emma, Amy and Stefan, members of the Exhibition Committee for the Material Culture Conference this spring, went on a research trip last Friday. They ventured out to Orfordville Wisconsin to visit the workshop of Lynn Sorgatz, an artist-engineer. Sorgatz is one of a handful of craftspeople in the United States who restore and construct fountain pens using vintage designs and materials. He uses labor-intensive techniques such as lathing and polishing acrylic and cellulose acetate for the pen bodies, hand tooling metals for ornamentation, and carving shells to decorate the exteriors. Sorgatz's pens will be exhibited on campus in conjunction with the conference, and he will be lecturing about his work and the history of pen making in Wisconsin on the first evening of the conference. 

The Knitted Bus Shelter Cozy That Rocked State Street, Sept. 30-Oct. 1

Although the shelter cozy is gone, visions of its bright exterior remain.  Thanks to members of the Design Studies Department and the MadisonKnitters' Guild for their hard work.  The Handmade Meaning blog has a nice recap by one of the participants.  Check out other news stories that accompanied the cozy:

from the Design Gallery: http://www.designgallery.wisc.edu/exhibits/knitta/index.html
from the Isthmus: http://www.thedailypage.com/theguide/details.php?event=250151&name=Cozy-Shelter