"全身设计": Lockwood de Forest between Ahmedabad and Bryn Mawr

小时
Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. | other times by appointment, SpecColl@bestbetonsports.net 

打开事件
周四,10月. 24, 2019, 4:30 p.m., Carpenter B21 | reception to follow in the Rare Book Room

相关的 周五发现 事件 most Fridays at noon.

Bryn Mawr College is home to a remarkable collection of furniture made in the late nineteenth century by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in Gujarat, 印度. But how did 印度n art and design come to occupy the central spaces of this American campus? A closer look beyond the intricately carved chairs and densely patterned metalwork reveals complex global networks of art, 劳动, 和赞助, as well as the ambiguous role of Lockwood de Forest (1850–1932), the designer responsible for bringing them here.  

This exhibition explores de Forest’s furniture and decorating work at Bryn Mawr College as an expression of his “all-over” vision of design. De Forest used “all-over design” to describe non-directional, infinitely repeating patterns, but the phrase also captures the aesthetic density of de Forest’s interior decorating projects and the expansive geographic origins of this furniture. De Forest arranged 印度n-made chairs, 沙发, and tables alongside Syrian chests, 俄罗斯的青铜器, and Tiffany glass to create eclectic spaces in which every surface was laden with pattern and texture.  

De Forest celebrated an ‘印度n’ aesthetic, advocated for 印度n furniture makers, and argued for the inclusion of 印度n art in American museums and schools. 尽管真正的, his enthusiasm was framed by Orientalist attitudes which emphasized the ‘exotic’ and decorative aspects of 印度n art and helped to perpetuate longstanding systems of colonial oppression. At Bryn Mawr, his client M. Carey Thomas had an avid interest in global art and design—an interest held in tandem with her damaging belief in racial hierarchy and policies of exclusion. The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company furniture displayed here offers a physical trace of this layered history.