Material Culture Caucus Panel: Crafting Empire: Material Culture Perspectives on the Objects of Colonial Relation

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel probes the ways in which craft and design are intimately entangled in economies, discourses, aesthetics, and practices of the American empire. The presenters ask how craft invites us to see both extractive and resistant dynamics more clearly and with more immediate texture. With a keen eye on the material processes of fabrication, circulation, marketing, and display, Angela Hermano Crenshaw, Erin Dowding, Gerald Ronning, and Alison J. Clarke remind us that craft is good to think with and can help us confront the intimacies of empire. These scholars use objects and material practices to reorient our gaze on the borders and boundaries of “America” and evidence the flows of power, knowledge, tradition, skill, labor, and literal things that make up the global US empire.

Angela Hermano Crenshaw examines the ways in which Filipino textiles, labor, and people were engaged with and exploited in the American colonial period. She asks what it meant for Filipino textiles to be “Made in America,” inviting us to look closely at the telescoping dynamics of colonial control. Erin Dowding orients our attention to Puerto Rico and the San Juan Textile Shop, established in 1947. She asks us to consider the interplay between “indigenous fibers” and metallic threads, noting how mid-century interior designers like Geraldine Funk marketed and packaged maguey, banana bark, and sugar cane for American department stores and homes. Gerald Ronning also considers the marketing of “authenticity” alongside the realities of global markets of production and exchange. In his discussion of the desire for “reliced” guitars, he argues that the demand for authenticity can produce seemingly paradoxical material effects. Finally, Alison J. Clarke explores design anthropology as a mechanism of US empire and identifies it as a key dynamic of late Cold War United States development policy. She highlights the ways indigenous practices of design and vernacular material culture from Puerto Rico to Pakistan were seen as sites of potent geopolitical intervention and local craft practices became modes through which “indigenous cultures could be recolonized for the project of Western expansionism.”

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “Mrs. Funston in Filipino Costume”: Philippine Textiles, American Fashion, and American Imperialism in the Philippines - Angela Hermano Crenshaw, Bard Graduate Center

• Geraldine Funk, The San Juan Fiber Textile Shop, and Weaving Wild Fibers - Erin Dowding, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Relics of Empire: Demand for Artificially Aged Guitars in the Post-Industrial US - Gerald Ronning, Minneapolis College of Art & Design

• Design Anthropology: US Cold War Development Politics in the Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World - Alison J. Clarke, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Chair

• Mariah R Kupfner, Penn State University Harrisburg

Comment

• Mariah R Kupfner, Penn State University Harrisburg

Biographical Information

Angela Hermano Crenshaw is an art historian, curator, and educator specializing in dress and textiles. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where she recently earned her MA. Her work focuses on American receptions of the Philippines in the US colonial period via material objects, particularly textiles. She has published in The Journal of Dress History and has shared her work at conferences at Yale University, Boston University, and the New England Museums Association. Angela received her undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and has held positions at Providence College Galleries and the RISD Museum, where she also curated the exhibition “From Pineapple to Pañuelo: Philippine Textiles.”

Erin Dowding is a PhD student in Design History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focusing on craft, textiles, and architectural history and the intersections of people, modernity, and the material world with an emphasis on the role of gender in design. She received a MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies at Parsons School of Design run in conjunction with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She was a Curatorial Research Fellow in the textiles department and a Curatorial Capstone Fellow working on the physical and digital exhibition A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes and its accompanying monograph. She was a Summer Fellow in the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a Research Fellow for the Tremaine Foundation working to create a digital museum of Burton G. and Emily Hall Tremaine’s historic art collection. She is currently the Jane Graff Project Assistant at the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Design Studies and Material Culture.

Gerald Ronning is a professor and the chair of Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. A graduate of Carleton College, Ronning holds a PhD in history from the University of Colorado-Boulder and a MA in history from New York University. While in Colorado he coordinated the roadside historical marker program for the Colorado Historical Society. His scholarship has won prizes from the Center for the American West and the Labor and Working Class History Association, and he is the 2013 recipient of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award. His current research is in the history of craft and culture in musical instrument production.


Professor of Design History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Alison J. Clarke combines a background in design history (MA, RCA/V&A, London) with training as a social anthropologist (PhD University College London). She is Director of the Papanek Foundation, Vienna, which focuses on the critical and ethical aspects of design as a dispersed social activity. Her recent monograph Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021) explores the controversial origins of social design, casting a critical perspective on the birth of a movement that has claimed to promote social justice through people-centred approaches. Her present book and research project - Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World (MIT Press) - explores the blurred historical boundaries between design practice and anthropology, and the social consequences of the uptake of this melding in the contemporary corporate sector. She is also author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Smithsonian Press, 1999). Clarke’s research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Austrian Science Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, among others. Her present research project Design Anthropology, Cold War Industrial Design and Development (FWF 2024-2027) explores the controversial role of designers in appropriating vernacular material cultures as a core policy of Cold war US development strategy.

Mariah Kupfner is Assistant Professor of American Studies & Public Heritage and program coordinator for the graduate certificate in Heritage & Museum Practice at Penn State Harrisburg. Kupfner received her Ph.D. in American & New England Studies from Boston University. Kupfner’s current book project—-Crafting Womanhood: Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810-1920-—examines the political resonances and applications of American women’s decorative needlework. She explores the abolition of slavery, women’s property rights, girlhood education, and the suffrage movement through lens of the stitch and argues that gender is itself a crafted form. Kupfner's work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Library Company, the Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections, Winterthur, the Center for Craft, and the Decorative Arts Trust. Kupfner currently serves as co-chair for the Material Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association, Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Fellow at Penn State, and faculty advisor for a student knitting and crochet club at Penn State Harrisburg.