“Nancy Owen’s study shows that art and aesthetics are molded by the society that supports them, not the other way around.”
Anita Ellis, Chief Curator, Cincinnati Museum of Art and author of Rookwood Pottery: The Glaze Lines
Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati—the largest, longest-lasting, and arguably most important American Art Pottery—reflected the country’s cultural and commercial milieux in the production, marketing, and consumption of its own products.
Rookwood and the Industry of Art is a critical appreciation of Rookwood’s rise to its commercial pinnacle, assessing the labor practices and production of ceramic ware as a way to explore anxiety about women’s roles outside the home as well as about industrialization, immigration, and urbanization.
In this illustrated study, Nancy Owen analyzes the discrepancies between the concepts of fine art and culture and the managerial positioning of the firm as “an artist’s studio, not a factory.” Owen also looks at the meaning of Americanness as portrayed in the choices of decoration and in the marketing campaigns that sought to elevate the ceramic ware to an artform.
For the collector as well as the cultural historian, Rookwood and the Industry of Art is a revealing and sensitive treatment of this uniquely American commercial and artistic phenomenon.
Nancy E. Owen is a lecturer in American art and women's studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She lives on the north shore of Chicago with her husband, Bill James. More info →
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Paperback
978-0-8214-1338-8
Retail price: $29.95,
S.
Release date: March 2001
320 pages
·
7 × 9½ in.
Rights: World
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1337-1
Retail price: $60.00,
S.
Release date: March 2001
320 pages
·
7 × 9½ in.
Rights: World
The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin
By Anita J. Ellis
A tribute to a woman artist who rose to one of the highest positions in her field.
Art History · Biography & Autobiography | General · Ohio and Regional
The Cincinnati Wing
The Story of Art in the Queen City
By Julie Aronson
On May 10, 2003, the Cincinnati Art Museum will celebrate the opening of the Cincinnati Wing: eighteen thousand square feet of handsomely renovated gallery space devoted to the museum’s renowned collections of painting, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, and metalwork by Cincinnati artists. The museum is the first in the country to reinterpret its American art collections with a regional emphasis, fostering civic pride and drawing attention to the achievements of the city’s artists.In
Rookwood and the American Indian
Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection
By Anita J. Ellis and Susan Labry Meyn
·
Foreword by George P. Horse Capture
Rookwood and the American Indian blends anthropology with art history to reveal the relationships between the white settlers and the Native Americans in general, between Cincinnati and the American Indian in particular, and ultimately between Rookwood artists and their Indian friends.
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