Over the century and a half of its existence (1648–1793), the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture amassed a collection of more than 15,000 artworks: paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, casts, and medals.[1] Its conceptual core was formed by reception pieces (morceaux de réception)—works that young artists submitted for examination…
Guillaume Lethière (The Clark Art Institute, June 15-October 14, 2024)Guillon Lethière, né à la Guadeloupe (Musée du Louvre, November 13, 2024-Feburary 17, 2025) Since last June, museumgoers on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to discover the extraordinary life and career of the neoclassical painter Guillaume Guillon Lethière…
Between 1725 and 1733, Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony (r. 1694-1733) and King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1697-1706, 1709-33), acquired an extraordinarily rare Chinese treasure for his Green Vault (Grünes Gewölbe). In 1723, this private Dresden palace royal treasury, originally known as the Privy…
The culmination of the recent Entangled Pasts exhibition at the Royal Academy, London (3 February–28 April 2024) was undoubtedly Lubaina Himid’s monumental work Naming the Money (2004) (Fig. 1). The exhibition itself was an ambitious and highly admirable engagement by the Royal Academy with its own institutional “entanglement” with colonial and…
Elizabeth Eager In a passage from her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft raises a concern: women were spending too much time on their needlework. She argues that, [female] reason will never acquire sufficient strength to enable it to regulate their conduct, whilst the making an appearance…
Yve Chavez In the 1930s, artist Edith Hamlin painted a mural for San Francisco’s Mission High School titled Civilization Through the Arts and Crafts as Taught to the Neophyte Indians, in which she depicted Native women preparing wool yarn and weaving wool cloth on a standing loom (Fig. 1). In the…
Hampton Smith Sometime in the spring of 1800, enslaved tobacco cutters in Henrico County, Virginia, brought their scythes to one of Brookfield plantation’s blacksmiths, Solomon Prosser, for sharpening.[1] Instead of whetting the blades to aid in expedient cultivation, however, Solomon detached each curved blade from its wooden handle. Then, using…
Natalie E. Wright and Glenn Adamson The video game Minecraft may be the most popular form of making that has ever existed. In any given month, there are 100 million users globally. In this virtual world, materials come out of the ground as pixelated graphics with the click of a…
Julie Bellemare, N. Astrid R. van Giffen, and Robert Schaut Since 2019, the Corning Museum of Glass has been investigating the making of its “realgar-colored” glass objects. A Chinese innovation, this red and orange glass was developed in the early decades of the eighteenth century and used at the Qing…
Caroline Wigginton These are the moccasins of Mohegan artisan Lucy Tantaquidgeon Tecomwas (1753-1834) (Fig. 1). Turning to their form, this essay reads with the moccasins’ design of multi-dimensional visual and material elements, especially their incorporation of the Trail of Life motif. In reading with form, it locates craft as a…