Programs

Seminar in American Visual and Material Culture
Wednesday, November 8, 2000

PR�CIS: After the Revolution, plain portraits, Windsor chairs, clocks with wooden movements, and popular fiction became available as a new middling group of consumers who sought to advance their new position in rural society with those goods emerged. Artisan-entrepreneurs made more goods available by using different techniques, tapping available sources of power, and experimenting with redesigned objects. Middling families and enterprising rural artisans broke the pre-Revolutionary elite's monopoly on status-bearing domestic furnishings and loosened the solidity of cultural meaning contained in the goods of colonial gentry households. This paper will show how commerce and culture came together in a process, really a transformation, where men and women made a business of providing and using cultural commodities. Rural style did not evolve in a vacuum. Using examples drawn primarily from the upper Connecticut River valley, this paper will discuss the cultural complexity of these objects-clock cases or card tables-often with their neoclassical motifs (literary or decorative) that marked the hybridized nature of provincial design.

Refreshments will be provided during the discussion of the paper. Afterwards, a supper, with wine, will be served in the dining room of the Goddard-Daniels House at $14.00 per person. . The entr‚e will be chicken cordon bleu. If you would prefer a vegetarian entr‚e, please indicate below. If you wish to stay for supper, please send your check in that amount to arrive at AAS by Monday, November 6. The Society regrets that it is unable to make refunds for dinner after that date.