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.