Mina Loy's Interior Designs

FAIN: FT-51749-03

Susan B. Rosenbaum
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

Mina Loy (1882-1966) was a modernist who defied national and disciplinary boundaries: a poet, novelist, manifesto writer, painter, fashion designer, art gallery agent, lampshade manufacturer, and inventor. She was born in London, studied in Munich, began her career in Paris and Florence, and later moved to New York and Aspen. While the early work of this fascinating figure has received scholarly attention, her work from the 1940's and 1950's, her American period, remains largely unstudied. During this time Loy lived mainly in the Bowery district of New York, where she completed a series of poems and collages that examine the life of the Bowery---its street culture, inhabitants, economy, architecture. I propose to study Mina Loy's Bowery poems and collages in the context of mid-century interior design.

Associated Products

Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920-1970 (Book Section)
Title: Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920-1970
Author: Susan Rosenbaum
Editor: Cary Nelson
Abstract: This essay surveys surrealist influence on the American poetry scene from 1920 to 1970 through analysis of key little magazines, gallery publications, and museum exhibitions, as well as central figures in this history, including Julien Levy, Mina Loy, Charles Henri Ford, Peggy Guggenheim, and John Ashbery.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/Poetry/?view=usa&ci=9780195398779
Primary URL Description: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
ISBN: 978-0-19-53987

Shifting Structures of Innovation: Mina Loy, Visual Culture, and the Avant-Garde (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Shifting Structures of Innovation: Mina Loy, Visual Culture, and the Avant-Garde
Author: Susan Rosenbaum, Linda Kinnahan, Irene Gammel, Alex Goody, Susan Dunn, Suzanne Churchill
Abstract: This roundtable proposes to shift our understanding of modernist “structures of innovation” through a focus on what Peter Middleton calls an "intersubjective network,” e.g. the “author” considered as the crux of a number of social and aesthetic performances and institutions. Mina Loy (1882-1966) provides our network: a poet, novelist, painter, fashion designer, lampshade maker, and gallery agent, she lived in London, Munich, Paris, Florence, Mexico, and New York, associating with writers and artists connected to Art Nouveau, cubism, futurism, dada, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. With the conference theme in mind, the roundtable will position Mina Loy as the center of a "structure of innovation" as a means of illuminating that structure from an altered perspective. Each participant will consider Loy in relation to a particular visual artist, movement, or institution in the visual arts, with the aim of using this connection to engage larger questions about gender and sexuality, the relationship between different media, and the history of the avant-garde. Although Loy is our starting point, we do not consider this roundtable a “single-author” conversation; rather, Loy’s work and connections to a variety of avant-garde movements will help us to map new constellations of artists, and to generate new ways of thinking about modernism and visual culture.
Date: 10/8/2011
Primary URL: http://www.msa13.com/?s=roundtable+6
Primary URL Description: Modernist Studies Association 13th Annual Conference
Secondary URL: http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa13/index.html
Secondary URL Description: Conference Website
Conference Name: Modernist Studies Association: Structures of Innovation

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