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NEWCOMB COLLEGE POTTERY, ARTS AND CRAFTS, AND THE NEW SOUTH
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2018
Abstract
In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.
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- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 121 - 144
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018
References
NOTES
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51 Mary G. Sheerer, “Newcomb Pottery,” Keramic Studio, Nov. 1899, 151.
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65 One mark of this shift from a regional to a national focus is Newcomb's participation in Stickley's United Crafts exhibition in 1903. See Sanders, A Complex Fate, 40–41.
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72 Ibid.
73 Nicola Gordon Bove, “The Search for Vernacular Expression: The Arts and Crafts Movements in America and Ireland” in The Substance of Style, ed. Bert Denker, 5. See also Greenhalgh, Paul, “The History of Craft” in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, ed. Dormer, Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 31 Google Scholar.
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75 Boris, Art and Labor, 29–30.
76 Ednah Robinson, “Newcomb Pottery: Its Makers and the Lesson They Are Teaching Southern Women,” Sunset Magazine (May 1903): 132.
77 Forensic Quarterly, Sept. 1910, 257–58.
78 Ibid., 259.
79 Forensic Quarterly, Sept. 1910, 259.
80 Anita J. Ellis, “American Tonalism and Rookwood Pottery” in Denker, The Substance of Style,” 303–5.
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88 Ellsworth Woodward, “Art Taught as a Means of Expression,” folder 11, box 2, Woodward Speeches, Tulane University Archives.
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96 Woodward borrows the term “genius loci” from the British aesthete Vernon Lee, who published a book entitled Genius Loci: Notes on Places in 1899. It first crops up in Woodward's vocabulary in a 1916 article published in the Newcomb Arcade.
97 Woodward, “Art in Colleges,” Newcomb Arcade, Jan. 1916: 31.
98 Other educational that featured stories on Newcomb in its final decades include Manual Training and the Journal of the Southern Educational Association (Dec. 1910).
99 In later years, Woodward helped found the Southern States Art League (1920), and was made president of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in 1924. He retired from Newcomb in 1933, dying in 1939. Richard Megraw, “Ellsworth Woodward,” http://www.knowla.org/entry/529/&view=summary (accessed Sept. 10, 2016).
100 In a late writing, Woodward stresses that Newcomb College pottery was to be found in “museum collections in the US and abroad,” emphasizing NCP's legacy, its value as a collectible and a historical artifact. [Newcomb College founded in 1887], folder 23, box 2, Woodward Speeches, Tulane University Archives.