Art and Design Commons^™

Just Enough, Amelia Greteman

Masters Theses

As a child, I never answered the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “a furniture designer.” Even though both of my parents are artists, making things never seemed like a job; it just seemed like something we all loved to do. Some of my best memories are of working in the studio alongside them - painting, smearing, building, and destroying, but always vigilantly coloring within the lines.

This thesis investigates my past and current relationship to making and the urge I have to simplify and reduce. It takes place in the form of furniture …

Holding Spaces, Zibby Jahns

Masters Theses

I’ve focused my graduate studies at RISD on the conceptual and social function of chairs as an investigation into comfort and grief. Grief is an apprehension: defined both as “to grasp” and as “anxiety/loss”.

With the multitude of deaths due to the inadequacies of our government and healthcare system, and the general anxiety everyone has been feeling through this pandemic, it has felt difficult to grieve for any individual person, in person. We have to grieve in the ways capitalism has taught us: silently, behind closed doors, without much time or fuss or drama, mourn with dollars and move on. …

Rains, B. Mickey (Fa 1178), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1178. Student folk studies project titled “The Crafting of Hickory Bottomed Chairs” which includes interviews and survey sheets about the process of making hickory bottomed chairs in Macon County,Tennessee. Sheets may include a brief description of a practice, a hotograph, and text classification.

Pack, Chester (Fa 985), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 985. Project titled: “Chair Making.” Includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of chair making implements of Elliott “Red” Keown in Warren County, Kentucky. Sheets include a brief description, terms, and a photo of the implement or chair.

Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, Ambika Subramaniam

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The following thesis examines the work of Ambika Subramaniam, in particular her thesis installation Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, for the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis. Based within a discussion of semiotics, the thesis researches furniture signification and tracks its evolution through traditional form, ergonomic function, and consumed product. Major points include the ways in which objects are capable of collapsing and retaining the semiotic divide between a sign and referent, and how that signification relates to contemporary design-oriented products. Using the chair as the exemplifying object, the thesis installation questions how objects have …

I Remember..., Jessica Scott-Felder

Art and Design Theses

I Remember…, a series of drawings, is based on personal social experiences starting from the age of thirteen. This series begins with a memory of the first time I had to speak to a room full of people and the unexpected events of that followed. My own relationship with one of the primary subjects, the chair refers to memories of being raised in a home where certain furnishings were “off-limits.” Even more important is the presence of a cryptic narrative, fractured and dreamlike, similar to the style of writing created by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It has been a lifetime goal to …

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 22, No. 3, Burt Feintuch, Susan J. Ellis, Waln K. Brown, Louis Winkler, Friedrich Krebs

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• Frank Boccardo: Toward an Ethnography of a Chairmaker
• Traditional Food on the Commercial Market: The History of Pennsylvania Scrapple
• The Pennsylvania Dutch Carriage Trade
• Pennsylvania German Astronomy and Astrology V: Religion and Astronomy
• American Emigration from Baden-Durlach in the Years 1749-1751
• The House - External and Internal Orientation: Folk-Cultural Questionnaire No. 28
• Pennsylvania Emigrants from Friedrichstal

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 13, No. 1, Earl F. Robacker, George L. Moore, Russell S. Baver, Amos Long Jr., Edna Eby Heller, Florence Baver

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• The Paint-Decorated Furniture of the Pennsylvania Dutch
• My Mother's Kitchen
• "H" is for Hinkle
• An Album of Chester County Farmhouses
• Smokehouses in the Lebanon Valley
• Morning Glory Cake
• Five Years of Folk Festivaling