Stick with Folk Art to Celebrate Safety Pin Patenting Anniversary Day!
The safety pin was first patented April 10, 1849 by Walter Hunt of New York.
Stick with Folk Art to Celebrate Safety Pin Patenting Anniversary Day!
The safety pin was first patented April 10, 1849 by Walter Hunt of New York.
Can you imagine the world without it? It is small and a bit quirky, but it holds the most amazing things together!
Political parody was a favorite subject for Edward Kay. Here, from top to bottom, he has depicted President Ford in his University of Michigan football uniform, the U.S. Capitol, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and President Nixon, his lips sealed with a safety pin.
Edward Kay began to carve totem poles and other complex figures during Prohibition, when he traded a fifth of whiskey for some wood-working tools. Until 1977, when he moved into an apartment, many of his more than 100 totems stood outside his home in Michigan.
Pictured top: Edward A. Kay, (1900–1988), Gerald Ford Totem Pole,1974, carved, painted, and turned wood, painted metal, modeling compound, printed papers, adhesive stickers, wishbone, stamps, tacks, and safety pin, 91 x 12 1/2 in. diam., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson.
Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: For the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
Pictured bottom: Edward A. Kay, Gerald Ford Totem Pole (detail).