Overview

Through an exploration of the tactile pleasures of drinking vessels, Pitchers of American Life traces the role of these objects as representative art and collective tools—episodes of American history that resonate today in our everyday lives and yearnings for sociability and communion. Generously illustrated, and richly woven with personal memoir, discussion ranges from vessels within ancient cultures and religious and family rituals to the growth of mass production and contemporary consumer culture. Shales blends the social histories of art/artifacts with memories of working on a museum installation crew, as an educator, and as a shopper; in each chapter he interprets a single object as a revealing time capsule.

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9781350386716

Table of Contents

Reviews

A thoughtful book that looks with care at the overlooked. * Magdalene Odundo, OBE, artist and Emerita Professor, University for the Creative Arts, UK * Authoritative historical scholarship leavened by Shales’s connoisseurial passions and humor. * Juliet Kinchin, former Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA * Shales shows how humble wares can mean more than the most rare and exquisite, yet untouchable, of gallery exhibits. Art historians and museum curators, take note! * Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, UK * No mean feat. You will never look at a Kool-Aid pitcher in the same way again. * Gerald W.R. Ward, Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture Emeritus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA * An epic achievement for fictile scholarship. * Garth Clark, founder of Garth Clark Gallery and editor of C-File *

Author Information

Ezra Shales is Professor in the History of Art department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA. He teaches craft and design history and is the author of The Shape of Craft (2017) and Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010). He has also contributed chapters to publications such as Craft Economies (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Ceramics Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has written widely on contemporary artists and modernist ceramicists, and his work has appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals such as Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Craft.

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