Fellow

Maeve M. Hogan

SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft and Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellow
photo portrait of a women
Fellowship Name
SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft and Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellow
Affiliation
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison
Years
20242025
Between Utility and Art: Recovering Fiber-Based Craft Histories of the 1950s and 1960s

My dissertation, “Between Utility and Art: Recovering Fiber-Based Craft Histories of the 1950s and 1960s,” revises the story of craft made and collected in America. The project was initiated by the discovery of an intact collection of studio craft and fiber art assembled before 1968. The collection totals well over one hundred items and includes art and domestic material culture objects by internationally recognized makers as well as by those whose names have largely fallen out of the record of craft history. The collection was formed by Professor Helen Allen, who taught weaving and related arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1927 to 1968. It is an amazing survival of a personal collection formed at a time when ideas about the functional and aesthetic value of textiles as objects of modern handicraft, utility, and art were in flux. Study of this collection will reconstitute a history of fiber work that bridges art and design while adding to the history of craft and material culture pedagogy in the American academy.  

This project addresses a gap in scholarship that exists between Arts and Crafts–inspired handicraft, modernist theories of decoration and utility, and postmodern reformulations of fine art hierarchies. The gap exists in part because of a generational disjuncture in the ways craft workers practiced and perceived themselves and in part because of developments in art and design criticism. Literature on these topics has typically been cultivated by separate fields including art history, histories of modernism and design, and material culture studies. My research elevates neglected linkages between these poles, bringing a new sense of continuity to craft in the twentieth century. In the collections and libraries of the Smithsonian Institution, my research will focus on sites of physical and intellectual exchange where discourse over the changing roles of art, craft, and design played out. This work will expose the importance of networks of makers, educators, gallerists, curators, and editors, working in conversation to cultivate textile art at midcentury.