Read more
Generously illustrated, and richly woven with personal memoir, Pitchers of American Life is a survey of pitchers, jugs, and drinking vessels, tracing their role as representative art and collective tool. Today, when many of our possessions are no longer tools that make us feel more human but less so, it is important to take stock of an everyday manufacture that does humanize us. The use and reuse of a communal tool can broaden our awareness of collective cultural dialogues, our sense of kinship, and our sense of the mystical sensation of coziness. Each of the 12 communal drinking vessels examined, from Ancestral Pueblo ceramic to Colonial Boston silver, and from a Victorian-era "saloon" jug to a Machine Age punchbowl, is interpreted as a prism of collective meaning, and negotiated as a distinct "time capsule". Readers are encouraged to become archaeologists of their own everyday possessions, as Shales blends his interpretations with a personal excavation of his own family heirlooms of plastic and chipped earthenware.
List of contents
Introduction
Time Capsule 1: Standing on One Foot: A Kylix from Cyprus
Time Capsule 2: Animated Bodies: A Chimú Whistling Jug
Time Capsule 3: Handling America: An AncestralPueblo Vessel
Time Capsule 4: Impressing Jugs: Bartmannkrüge
Time Capsule 5: Communal Caudle Cups (as Instruments for Ecstasy)
Time Capsule 6: Communing with Illustrious Heads and Face Jugs
Time Capsule 7: Publishing Art(c)T Jugs, "A Display of Multifarious Learning"
Time Capsule 8: Pitchering Women at the Well
Time Capsule 9: Decanting Tribal Identities
Time Capsule 10: Little Brown Jugs: Artifice or Authenticity?
Time Capsule 11: Modern Equipment
Time Capsule 12: Throwaway Culture Connoisseurship
Conclusion: A Pitcher of Reliefe
About the author
Ezra Shales is Professor in the History of Art department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA. He teaches craft and design history and is the author of The Shape of Craft (2017) and Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010). He has also contributed chapters to publications such as Craft Economies (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Ceramics Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has written widely on contemporary artists and modernist ceramicists, and his work has appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals such as Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Craft.
