Joseph Harold Larnerd
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 0
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My project develops a social art history of a once-popular genre of decorative art called "cut glass, " domestic glassworks like bowls and vases incised with geometric patterns against stone and metal wheels. Specifically, I consider how the medium, its widely-discussed manufacture, and representations of each intervened in how working-class citizens created and negotiated their perceptions of themselves, their compatriots, and their nation. Scholarship on cut glass privileges the stories of upper- and middle-class consumers, but wage laborers--including those who made and maintained cut glass--encountered cut glass, its marketing, and their attendant class biases as well. Over five object-centered chapters, I show how public demonstrations of glass cutting, illustrations of domestics with cut glass, President McKinley's much-publicized punch set, and other artifacts reinforced and, often, unintentionally challenged prevailing conceptions of social class, privilege, and mobility. Given what one period journalist called "the rage for cut glass, " the medium offers a privileged site for apprehending the intersections of class, labor, and materiality in Gilded Age America, and their implications for working-class life and culture.