Special exhibit booth at Wisconsin Antique Dealers Association show

The Wisconsin Antique Dealers Association generously invited me to present a special “Made in Wisconsin” exhibit booth at their winter show and sale in Waukesha. Rebecca Wangard (a part-time research assistant supported by the Chipstone Foundation) and I spent the first weekend in February at the Waukesha Expo Center, where we displayed an eclectic range of Wisconsin-made art and craft objects and shared information about the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database project.

Many thanks to WADA for this opportunity (and special thanks to show director Rick Kojis for coordinating the booth)! Thanks as well to all the WADA members who loaned items for the exhibit:  Ron and Debby Christman (R. Christman Antiques & Art), Steve Cypher (Sharron’s Antiques), Bob Markiewicz (Bob’s Antiques), Phillip R. Schauer (Pipsqueak & Me), Kathy Bruce (Willow Works), Pam Ewig, Scott Sieckman (Monches Farm), Jim Walter (Calamity House), and Judy Wucherer (Transition of Wales).

Local dealers and collectors loaned a wide range of Wisconsin-made art and craft objects for the booth, including work by Milwaukee metalworker Cyril Colnik, paintings by several important Wisconsin artists including F. W. Heine, a 1843 needlework sampler from Shullsburg, and a unique sofa collected in the southeast part of the state.

Many of the smaller items came from private collections, including decorated Milwaukee stoneware, coin silver from Milwaukee and Madison, and several pairs of delicate hand-knit stockings with elaborate beading made by a German immigrant girl in Menomonee Falls.

A tower of enameled tin breadboxes manufactured by Milwaukee's Geuder, Paeschke, and Frey was paired with a period catalog of the company's "Cream City Ware."

A striking cherry schrank or wardrobe collected in Germantown, Washington County, caught the eye of many visitors. I opened it up at least half a dozen times to show off its ingenious "knock-apart" construction.

–Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer

New online exhibit spotlights Pauline Pottery’s women artists

The new digital exhibit "Behind the Brush: The Women of the Pauline Pottery" explores the stories of the women behind the success of the Pauline Pottery, an Edgerton, Wisconsin-based art pottery studio.

The digital exhibition “Behind the Brush: The Women of the Pauline Pottery” examines the work and lives of six women who worked for the Pauline Pottery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Laura Fry, Mae Johnson Wilt, Eugenie Hutchinson, Lulu Devereaux Dixon, Marie Brastad, and of course, the company’s founder, Pauline Jacobus. Most of the works featured come from collections documented in the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database, including the Kenosha Public Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Neville Public Museum of Brown County, the Rock County Historical Society,  the Wisconsin Historical Museum, and the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum. Additional images were provided by Pauline Pottery authority Ori-Anne Pagel of the Wisconsin Pottery Association.

Credit for much of the writing and research for the exhibit goes to Laura Houston, an undergraduate in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who worked with me this summer on an internship sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation and the UW’s Material Culture Program.

I created the exhibit in part as an experiment in the use of Pachyderm, an open-source, web-based multimedia authoring tool developed by the New Media Consortium. It was a little tricky to use–there’s no WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) interface, so it took a lot of back-and-forth between the web form and the preview pages to make sure things were turning out the way I wanted. But there’s no programming knowledge needed and I think the results look pretty slick. I’m hoping to use Pachyderm again in the future as a way to highlight other groups of objects in the database.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Grand Opening–American Collections Galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Ned Cooke, Charles Hummel and Peter Kenny examine a Finnish-American rocking chair in the Finest in the Western Country exhibition.

On October 23, the Chipstone Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum celebrated the grand opening of the newly reinstalled American Collections Galleries at MAM. Over the past year and a half, the lower level of the War Memorial building at MAM has been in a state of flux as Chipstone and the museum worked to reinterpret and re-present their world-class collections of early decorative arts. I had the opportunity to help out a bit on this exciting project–mostly with packing up (and months later, unpacking) Chipstone’s priceless British and American ceramics.

Thursday marked the public unveiling of the new galleries, including Loca Miraculi: Rooms of Wonder, an amazing installation by artist Martha Glowacki and Hidden Dimensions, which takes an anthropological approach to understanding familiar objects (inspired by the presentation methods of Chicago’s Field Museum). Noted artist Fred Wilson delivered a lecture examining his own interventions and critiques of traditional museum practices, including his influential installation “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society.

This was all great stuff, but I have to admit, the most exciting thing for me that day was the chance to show off the Finest in the Western Country exhibition to some of the major scholars who were in town for the opening events. I took Charles F. Hummel (former Deputy Director, Winterthur Museum and Library), Edward S. Cooke (Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale), Peter M. Kenny (Curator of American Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Jules Prown (Professor emeritus, History of Art, Yale) on a tour of the show. They were all quite impressed with the high levels of artistry and craftsmanship that these objects reveal. They were most fascinated by the rocking chair attributed to Finnish immigrant Heikke Saukko (from the Douglas County Historical Society in Superior) and proceeded to make the museum guard very nervous after spending so much time on hands and knees examining the chair’s very unusual construction.

I was thrilled to see these important people in the field, whose work I so admire, get excited about Wisconsin decorative arts. Objects made in Wisconsin–and throughout the Midwest–are an important part of the history of American decorative arts. Their appeal is not limited to regional specialists. I’m so excited to begin to nudge the topic towards a more national stage.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Exhibition opens at Milwaukee Art Museum!

It’s open! The exhibition I guest-curated for the Chipstone Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Finest in the Western Country: Wisconsin Decorative Arts 1820-1900, opened last Thursday Sept. 11th. About ninety people turned out for a reception sponsored by the American Heritage Society. I presented a lecture with a brief summary of the origins of the database project and an overview of decorative arts in early Wisconsin, examining the region’s dramatic transformation from a frontier economy to a settled state. One of my main arguments is that both craftspeople and consumers maintained close ties to myriad ethnic traditions but were also well informed of popular national trends.

I was absolutely thrilled to see all of the objects–40 in total, loaned by museums, local historical societies, and private collectors all over the state–come together in Milwaukee. The museum staff, especially exhibition designer Mike Mikulay, did an amazing job of presenting each object in a beautiful way.

I was in Milwaukee the entire week leading up to the show, and one of the most exciting points during the preparation stage was when a courier from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts delivered what is one of the highlights of the show–a painted cupboard made by Aslak Olsen Lie, a Norwegian immigrant cabinetmaker who worked in Dane County (see detail below). When the lid of the shipping crate was removed, everyone in the room leaned in and said “Wow!” The vibrant, energetic painted decoration makes Lie’s cupboard a true masterpiece of American furniture, and it’s wonderful to have it back in its home state for a while.

There are two more public events planned in conjunction with the exhibit. I’ll be presenting gallery talks (wearing white gloves so I can open up some drawers and doors to show off the details of the furniture) on Tuesday, September 23 and Tuesday, December 9, both at 1:30pm.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Rare Coverlet at Elmbrook Historical Society

I recently headed over to Brookfield to meet with Marion Bruhn of the Elmbrook Historical Society. I had a specific object in mind that I wanted to see: a coverlet woven in Milwaukee in 1850. After seeing how excited I was about this very rare and important piece, Marion generously agreed to loan it for the upcoming exhibition of Wisconsin decorative arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Elmbrook’s coverlet will be one of 40 artifacts from collections across the state presented in The Finest in the Western Country: Wisconsin Decorative Arts 1820-1900, opening at MAM on September 11, 2008.

Unfortunately, my search for more information about the coverlet’s makers, Mealey and Leity, has so far proved unsuccessful. A John Leity is listed in the 1849 city directory for Milwaukee, but his occupation is not given. Neither weaver appears in any of the census records I’ve seen.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

House Museums in Milwaukee

Two weeks ago I visited two major historic house museums in Milwaukee to find out about potential contributions to the database as well as possible object loans for an upcoming exhibition of Wisconsin decorative arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum (more on the exhibit later).

Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion
Most of the interiors and furnishings at the Pabst were designed by the Matthews Brothers Company, a Milwaukee manufacturer. In true Victorian fashion, the Matthews Bros. furnished the mansion in an array of historical styles, from the dark and heavy Venetian Renaissance in the music room to the gilded frills of the French Rococo in Mrs. Pabst’s parlor. The Pabst’s senior historian John Eastberg and curator Jodi Rich-Bartz are interested in contributing to the database and I’ll return in 2008 to photograph some of their furniture.

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
Most of the objects at the Villa Terrace are European decorative arts collected by the Smith family, but they do have a major collection of works by Milwaukee metalworker Cyril Colnik. The Colnik collection was reinstalled this summer by Dan Naumann, a professional blacksmith as well as a Colnik expert. The collection is supplemented by an archival collection of Colnik’s drawings, a recent gift from the Kohler Foundation. I’ll be returning soon to work with curator Laurel Turner to document the Colnik collection.