Giant Strides Beyond Traditional 'Feminine' Fields
Miro Kiss Ida
mikida at ZPOK.HU
2001. Jan. 3., Sze, 14:57:18 CET
ABSTRACT:
The ranks of female professional designers have swelled,
and they are also in fields once all but closed to them:
architecture and landscape, graphic, industrial and film-
set design. A Europe-oriented outlook has shifted to
include the work of women of different ethnicities. Women
have made such progress in this white male world that the
designation "female designers" now has little meaning. So
why the show "Women Designers in the U.S.A., 1900-2000:
Diversity and Difference" at the Bard Graduate Center for
Studies in the Decorative Arts? As Pat Kirkham, a
professor at the center who assembled the show and its
catalog, writes of the turn-of-the-century feminists who
favored separating women's art and design from that of men
at the world's fair: "They believed a separate show would
better highlight women's work and achievements and lead
to greater understanding and appreciation of it,"
-- Jim
__________________________________________________
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/29/arts/29DESI.html
December 29, 2000
DESIGN REVIEW
GIANT STRIDES BEYOND
TRADITIONAL 'FEMININE' FIELDS
By GRACE GLUECK
The 20th century has been quite a trip for
female American designers, who first made a play
for attention as a group by showing their work in
a Women's Building at the Chicago world's fair in
1893. They were mostly white, middle class and
skilled in "female" pursuits like textiles,
wallpaper, ceramics, embroidery, jewelry,
bookbinding, lace making, china and decorative
painting. They were after not much more than
recognition for their talents.
Today the ranks of female professional designers
has swelled, and they are also in fields once all
but closed to them, like architecture and
landscape, graphic, industrial and film-set
design. And a Europe-oriented outlook has shifted
to include the work of women of different
ethnicities. Women have made such progress in the
white male world that the designation "female
designers" now has little meaning.
So why the show "Women Designers in the U.S.A.,
1900-2000: Diversity and Difference" at the Bard
Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative
Arts? In the same spirit, wrote Pat Kirkham, a
professor at the center who assembled the show
and its weighty catalog, as the turn-of-the-
century feminists who favored separating women's
art and design from that of men at the world's
fair. "They believed a separate show would better
highlight women's work and achievements and lead
to greater understanding and appreciation of it,"
Ms. Kirkham wrote.
On view at the Bard Graduate Center are objects
designed by some 220 women in the 20th century.
Not only are they in fields traditionally
considered "feminine," like textiles, but they
also represent areas still resistant to women,
like industrial design, in which women designed
auto interiors and upholstery fabrics but very
rarely the car itself. The show stresses the
women's ethnic diversity, with special attention
to blacks whose work until recently was dismissed
as hybrid African-American, lacking the
"authenticity" of sought-after American Indian
objects.
The scope of the show is amazing: from high
couture by the black designer Ann Lowe to pottery
by Fannie Nampeyo of the Hopi-Pueblo culture;
from an Arts and Crafts-style necklace of silver,
gold and pearls by the early-20th-century
designer Josephine Hartwell Shaw to an austere
sofa by the midcentury modernist Florence Knoll;
from a quiet 1903 garden design by Beatrix Jones
Farrand to Edith Head's costumes for Grace Kelly
and Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief" (1955) and
Polly Smith's over-the-top befeathered get-up for
Miss Piggy in the 1996 film "Muppet Treasure
Island."
Architecture, landscaping, interiors, furniture,
textiles, apparel, books, posters, tableware,
wallpaper, lighting, ceramics, jewelry, pottery,
baskets, quilts, fashions, floor coverings, doors
for cars, silverware, costumes, film sets and
industrial products cram Bard's tight -- and
recently redesigned -- galleries. Presented along
with plans, photographs and videos, the objects
are cleverly arranged to take maximum advantage
of the space.
At the century's beginning, the Arts and Crafts
movement rode high, emphasizing the importance of
"common objects." It led to the revival of
handcrafts and promoted truth in materials, with
the idea that beauty and utility could coexist.
Among the outstanding examples from these early
days are an intricate, subtly colored "Dragonfly"
wallpaper (1905-1910) with Art Nouveau
antecedents, designed by Zulma Steele; Ellen
Gates Starr's delicate 1905 cover design of
stylized leaves and flowers for a leather- bound
edition of "Paradise Lost"; and an elaborate
bronze-and-crystal candelabrum (circa 1916) by
Marie Zimmerman.
Work by American Indian women was of particular
interest in the Arts and Crafts period. Among the
pottery, baskets, textiles and jewelry here are
treasures like the "Bright Morning Light" basket
bowl (1921), woven of tule and fern root with an
overall pattern of black claws by Dat So La Lee,
a former laundress of Washoe ancestry. Another,
much later, is a "Crossroads of the Continents"
belt (1990) by Denise Wallace. Of silver, gold,
semiprecious stones and fossilized walrus tusk,
Ms. Wallace's belt links together tiny figures in
the traditional regalia of her Aleut ancestors.
African-American designers are also played up in
the show, particularly in fashion and textiles,
the two fields that were initially most
accessible to them. Arresting textile patterns
like Lois Mailou Jones's "Totem Poles" (1928) and
Beverly Nusom's "Wild Banana" (1971) are
presented, along with a stunning "Debutante Gown"
(1958-60) of white silk satin adorned with a
trail of fake roses by Ann Lowe, the first black
designer to join the fashion establishment when
she opened a New York salon in 1950. (She
designed Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding gown.)
Now black women are active in most areas of
design, from computer graphics to industrial
interiors, although the catalog essay points out
that "issues of gender and race remain." Carole
Bilson, a product designer working for Eastman
Kodak, has created equipment like an ultrasound
imager (circa 1992). There are photographs of a
smart private interior by Cecil N. Hayes for a
Florida residence (1996), a sparkling corporate
office by Courtney Sloane (1996) and a sample of
very postmodern- looking industrial carpet
designed by Holly Hampton for the New Jersey
Performing Arts Center in Newark (1995-96).
Also well chronicled in the show and in its
catalog is the progress women made moving from
"interior decorators" to interior designers in
residential and corporate areas. Early on, the
profession was strictly male. But there were
women like Mary Jane Colter, whose 1902 décor for
an Indian gift shop at the Alvorado Hotel in
Albuquerque led to a job as house architect for
the Fred Harvey Company, for which she designed
everything from hotels to dining-car interiors.
The better-known Julia Morgan did William
Randolph Hearst's California estate, San Simeon,
begun in 1919 and finished in 1937. Elsie de
Wolfe, who abandoned an acting career for posh
interiors, got her start by designing those of
the Colony Club (1905-07), New York's elite
all-woman bastion. One of the best-known women in
the profession, Sister Parish, famous for her
chintz-filled "country house" rooms, was part of
the team that redid the White House interiors
during the Kennedy administration in the 1960's.
By 1960 the majority of interior design students
and practitioners were women. Since then much
stricter standards of training and
professionalism have been established in the
field and women today not only do corporate
headquarters but also hotels, stores, banks and
casinos. Yet there is still a long way to go, the
catalog essay argues, not least in terms of
recognition. After 70 years of professionalism
the best-known name in the trade is the very
commercial tastemaker -- not a designer -- Martha
Stewart.
Although it stands on its own and was separately
conceived, "A Woman's Hand: Designing Textiles in
America, 1945-1969" at the Museum of the Fashion
Institute of Technology makes a wonderful
complement to the Bard exhibition. Displaying all
breeds of textiles, from apparel to industrial
fabrics, it includes the work of more than a few
of the artists in the Bard show, including Anni
Albers, Ray Eames, Vera Neumann, Ruth Adler
Schnee, Marianne Strengell, Esther Haraszty,
Maria Kipp, Estelle Laverne and Ruth Reeves. In
some instances, they are represented by the same
designs.
The F.I.T. show, organized by Lynn Felsher,
curator of textiles at the museum, displays work
by more than 40 designers and includes about 75
printed, woven and knitted textiles. It is
arranged thematically in four areas: Organic
Nature, Modernism, Traditional and Pop/Op/Mod-
1960's.
The 25 years covered were a period of great
growth in the textile industry, when public
demand for new fabrics was high. Working in the
design departments of large mills, in their own
studios and as freelance designers, women made
significant contributions, but what they produced
was mostly anonymous.
One of the industry's few female stars was
Dorothy Liebes, known for her experiments with
boldly textured woven fabrics that incorporated
seemingly incompatible materials like bamboo and
glitzy Lurex. Her prototype for a window blind in
1952 is a folksy, hand-woven affair of Lurex,
cotton chenille, linen, silk and rayon on painted
wood slats.
Less innovative, but in demand, were
hand-screened prints. Among them are prizes like
Theresa Kilham's "Quetzalcoatl" and "Cameroon"
(both 1950), cued by Aztec and African themes.
Other highlights of the show include a
psychedelic screen-print furnishings fabric
(1967) by Marcelle Tolkoff, and the
Mexican-inspired geometric dress fabric "Serape,"
designed by Nina Lewin in 1951.
Unfortunately, the show's installation is less
than inspired, which makes viewing it more of a
challenge than it should be. But for anyone
interested in the development of postwar
textiles, it's a prime primer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/29/arts/29DESI.html
__________________________________________________
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________
*******
További információk a(z) Gesth-l levelezőlistáról