Feeling History through Colonial Revival Design in the United States, 1927-1947

FAIN: FT-285679-22

Katharine Wells
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI 53211-3153)

Writing to complete a manuscript on colonial revival design and American identity in the 1930s and 1940s based on three popular case studies.

This book project examines three popular attractions that thrilled American audiences by seeming to bring the past truly back to life: Colonial Williamsburg, the Thorne Miniature Rooms, and the Index of American Design. These colonial revival designs invited viewers to learn American history through aesthetic experience, not through reading or writing but through seemingly direct contact with the look and feel of history itself. This experience of feeling history produced uncanny effects, in which viewers underwent strange disconnects of time and space, and it helped naturalize ideologies of American exceptionalism and white nationalism. Yet relatively marginalized Americans, including women, recent immigrants, queer people, and people of color, took park in constructing these designs. By interrogating colonial revivalism, this book analyzes how an aesthetic experience of the past became effective at empowering new groups of Americans to take part in the design of American identity.

Associated Products

"Indexing Whiteness to American Design" (Article)
Title: "Indexing Whiteness to American Design"
Author: Wells, K. L. H.
Abstract: This essay argues that the Index of American Design helped transform understandings of White racial identity in the United States during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924, Euro-Americans were seen less as a malignant horde of separate races and more as a benign collection of ethnicities that made up a unified White or “Caucasian” race. The Index of American Design, a Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project of 1936–1942 that produced thousands of illustrations documenting decorative arts before 1900, constructed a canon of American art around these White ethnic groups. The Index excluded most objects made by Native, African, and Asian Americans and instead sought out “folk art” produced by relatively isolated or archaic groups descended from European immigrants. By celebrating the diversity of White Americans and presenting their material culture as the basis for a unified American art, the Index of American Design helped codify White racial formation and its underpinning of American national identity.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1086/722521
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Art
Publisher: Smithsonian American Art Museum

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