Kristina Wilson | Clark University - Worcester, MA
"Marketing, Empathy, Power: Locating Race and Gender in Mid-century Herman Miller Designs"
Wednesday, March 2, 2022 - 5.30 pm
Kristina Wilson is Professor of Art History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author, most recently, of Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design, published by Princeton University Press in spring 2021. She is also the author of two award-winning books. The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition won the Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art in 2011; Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (2004) won the Charles Montgomery Book Award from the Decorative Arts Society. She co-curated the exhibition Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period (Worcester Art Museum 2016), which won an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. She has also written numerous articles for journals and exhibition catalogues on subjects relating to design, painting, and museum history in twentieth-century America.
The Herman Miller Furniture Company introduced path-breaking modern designs to the postwar American market, many of which have become familiar items embedded in our domestic landscapes seventy-five years later. In this talk, Wilson will interrogate the postwar marketing of this furniture, examining advertising and promotional literature for designs by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames. She will also offer a close analysis of the forms in these objects, framed by the concept of empathy in design. Her research demonstrates how design objects participate in spatial and physical constructions of power, and specifically how these designs reinforced stereotypical gendered and racialized identities for postwar consumers. Her work also raises questions about how and why we value them today.