Design Studies PhD candidate Maeve Hogan’s dissertation research at UW–Madison has been driven by unique objects in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the School of Human Ecology. These works have the potential to help revise and broaden the story of craft made and collected in America, Hogan said. However, many of the items in the collection that Hogan studies lack essential documentation, making that task a difficult one.
This fall, Hogan is in residence at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (SAAM) in Washington, D.C. as a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft and Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellow. There, she’ll study key objects and players in the history of fiber art to better tell the story of UW–Madison’s collection and midcentury craft more broadly.
Hogan focuses on a subset of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection consisting of fiber art created between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s gathered by the collection’s founder Helen Louise Allen herself. These items provide a unique window into how textiles were considered by the art and design world before the fiber arts movement catalyzed into something bigger, more political, and conceptual in the late 1960s and 1970s, Hogan said.
“We have this really important time capsule assembled by a single woman, Helen Allen, who was an educator in weaving and decorative arts at UW. Her collection helps us understand how she was keeping abreast of national and international conversations about art and what she thought was important for her students to know as they were entering the careers in art, craft, and design, in the middle of the 20th century,” Hogan said. “Sometimes, after a movement or idea becomes really big, our understanding about what was important leading up to that success can be overwritten by later retellings. Seeing this nascent moment through the lens of all of these objects has been really exciting.”
As a student in the Design History pathway of the Design Studies PhD program, Hogan brings a background in art practice, material culture studies, and decorative arts history, as well as work experience at New York museums to her doctoral research. Her previous focus on craft and design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gives her a unique view of the mid-century objects in UW–Madison’s collection compared to scholars who might approach the collection from a contemporary art-historical mindset.
That unique viewpoint helps Hogan to see a throughline: from the arts and crafts movement of the 19th century represented in the collection as usable domestic objects with artistic qualities, through to the fiber art pieces created specifically to hang on walls in the 1960s and beyond.
As a fellow at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Hogan will examine similar object collections, artist files, and exhibition records at SAAM, the National Gallery, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
“The Smithsonian also houses the Archives of American Art, which hold deep archival records on particular makers or gallerists that are related to objects that I’m looking at,” she added.
In some cases, the archives might provide the only window into the identities of the objects’ creators, the thoughts of curators who included them in exhibitions, or the networks of the gallerists who promoted and sold these artworks. For example, Hogan looks forward to looking at the archives of interior designer and gallerist Bertha Schaefer, from whom Allen purchased several items. Hogan hopes to learn more about how Schaefer exhibited and promoted those objects and how they eventually made their way out of New York to Madison.
Hogan describes the UW’s Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection as a unique and active teaching collection notable for its size and breadth of objects, particularly when compared with collections at larger institutions that have more resources, but which might provide less access for individual study. This makes it a particularly rich collection to work with, she said.
“We’ve got a group of objects, of Scandinavian tapestry and damasks, that are sort of a one-for-one parallel with the Cooper Hewitt [National Design Museum] collection,” she said. “That’s wild because they’re in New York and they had a much larger donor base, so the spread of their collection comes from multiple donors and over time. What’s unique here is this is a single collector and a very short period of collecting.”
Hogan is excited to learn more about the items in UW–Madison’s collection through her work as a Smithsonian fellow. She sees it as an opportunity to restore artists’ names and stories to the catalog of their works and to add complexity to our understanding of the rise of fiber art. As one example, she found a crocheted wall hanging in the collection made by Kate Auerbach, who emigrated from Germany in 1941 and worked as a knitwear designer. Before emigrating, she had been the principal of an arts and crafts school in Berlin and studied with Johannes Itten, later known as a core faculty member of the Bauhaus. However, the collection record for the wall hanging had previously not included the artist’s name or any of the details of her life. Adding those details to the collection record will help other scholars find pieces like this and know more about them, providing a scaffolding for further research and writing, Hogan said. Additionally, as a result of this preliminary research, Auerbach’s wall hanging will likely be on view next spring in the Center for Design and Material Culture’s (CDMC) upcoming exhibition Afterlives.
“This is a really stunning piece, and I’m so excited to have rediscovered this woman’s story and to give her some space to be seen,” Hogan said.
While Hogan’s research as a SAAM fellow will contribute to her dissertation, she also hopes to curate a public-facing exhibit with the CDMC in parallel with that scholarly project that will share these stories with the Madison community — perhaps connecting them with people who remember when the fiber arts movement took off, or for whom these textiles might provide inspiration for future projects. As one of a handful of students currently focused on design history within the Design Studies PhD program, Hogan pointed out that the recognition her work is receiving through this Smithsonian Fellowship is significant and adds to the accolades that design history students at UW–Madison have received so far. Last year, design history PhD student Natalie Wright also received the Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellowship, and design history PhD candidate Addison Nace received a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Hogan, Wright, and Nace are three of five students currently enrolled in this highly specialized course of study. These accomplishments are one piece of external recognition for the important work being done in design history at UW–Madison, Hogan said.
“I’m really proud to represent the design history pathway of Design Studies, and to be contributing to craft history scholarship,” Hogan said. “I’m excited for how it impacts our little community here to share this research [and] show other scholars that we’re out here and doing really exciting work.”
Read more about Hogan’s fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.