Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000

A celebration of the many contributions of women designers to 20th-century American culture. Encompassing work in fields ranging from textiles and ceramics to furniture and fashion, it features the achievements of women of various ethnic and cultural groups, including both famous designers (Ray Eames, Florence Knoll and Donna Karan) and their less well-known sisters.

Table of Contents

Director’s Foreword
Susan Weber Soros

Preface
Pat Kirkham

Prologue: American Women in the Twentieth Century

Context Line
Compiled by Pat Kirkham and Sarah A. Lichtman

Social Change and Changing Experience
Eileen Boris

1. Women Deisgners in the USA, 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference
Pat Kirkham and Lynne Walker

2. Women Designers and the Arts and Crafts Movement
Wendy Kaplan

3. The Sacred Hoop: Native American Women Designers
Pamela Kladzyk

4. “Three Strikes Against Me”: African American Women Designers
Pat Kirkham and Shauna Stallworth

5. “Wellpaying Self-Support”: Women Textile Designers in the USA
Mary Schoeser and Whitney Blausen

6. Tradition and Transformation: Women Quilt Designers
Jacqueline M. Atkins

7. American Fashion
Valerie Steele

8. Women Jewelry Designers
Toni Greenbaum and Pat Kirkham

9. Women Metalsmiths
Jeannine Falino

10. Designing Hollywood: Women Costume and Production Designers
Deborah Nadoolman Landis and Pat Kirkham

11. In “A Man’s World”: Women Industrial Designers
Ella Howard and Eric Setliff

12. Women Furniture Makers: From Decorative Designers to Studio Makers
Edward S. Cooke Jr.

13. “A Woman’s Place…”?: Women Interior Designers

1900-1950
Pat Kirkham and Penny Sparke

1950-2000
Judith B. Gura

14. Women Landscape Designers
Leslie Rose Close

15. “Quietly Fine”/Quietly Subversive: Women Ceramic Designers
Cheryl Buckley

16. Colophon: Women Graphic Designers
Ellen Lupton

Checklist of the Exhibition

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Contributors

Jacqueline M. Atkins
Adjunct associate professor, New York University

Whitney Blausen
Independent textile historian, writer, and researcher

Eileen Boris
Professor, Studies in Women and Gender, University of Virginia; Charlottesville

Cheryl Buckley
Reader in Design History, University of Northumbria, England

Leslie Rose Close
Landscape historian

Edward S. Cooke Jr.
Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts, Yale University

Jeannine Falino
Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Toni Greenbaum
Independent art and design historian and curator

Judith Gura
Assistant professor, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn

Ella Howard
Ph.D. candidate, American and New England Studies, Boston University

Pat Kirkham
Professor, Bard Graduate Center, New York

Pamela Kladzyk
Adjunct professor, Parsons School of Design, New York

Deborah Nadoolman Landis
Film costume designer and dress historian

Bard Graduate Center publishes award-winning exhibition catalogues, books, and journals focusing on scholarship in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture.