American Material Culture Commons^™

The Politics Of Style: How Black Fashion Redefined Identity In The Civil Rights Movement (1950s-1970s), Ava Saleh

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

This paper explores how fashion served as a powerful political tool during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-70s, tracing its evolution from the polished Sunday Best to the Afro and militant style of the Black Panther Party. By examining respectability politics, the rise of the Black is Beautiful movement, and the Black Panthers’ visual strategies, this research explores how clothing and style reflected shifting approaches to resistance. It argues that Black Americans used fashion to challenge Eurocentric standards, reclaim heritage, and express pride, leaving a legacy of empowerment that continues to influence social movements.

On Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art And Energy Of American Comics, Mike Classon Frangos

Criticism

Petrochecmical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics by Daniel Worden. The Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 2024. Pp. 171. $34.95 cloth.

Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes

Criticism

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, interpret his famous mourning speech, “Logan’s Lament,” as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan’s words and deeds such as Jefferson’s book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan’s speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local …

On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon

Criticism

What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy’s found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy’s …

Pipestone Books: Indigenous Materialisms And Bibliographical Methods, Daniel Radus

Criticism

This article argues that the methods of bibliographical scholarship would be enriched with further attention to Indigenous ontological traditions. It does so via an analysis of a small tablet of pipestone that in 1957 was carved into the shape of an open book by Ephraim Taylor, a Dakota artist. The article first establishes that, for the Dakotas, pipestone is a vibrant and animate material, a sentient trace of ancestral kin. The article then aligns the pipestone sculpture with an archive of books whose material traits have been altered by Indigenous readers, arguing ultimately that a sophisticated account of these books—and …

Salvaging Print: Letterhead In Post-Industrial Urban America, Nancy Sharon Collins

The Mid-America Print Council Conference

This panel will explore the link between today’s small press movement and the formal aspects of commercial printing during the American 20th century. Panelists include Christine Medley , Philip Gattuso, and Nancy Bernardo.

Using as its primary example letterhead from defunct companies in Detroit, and secondarily, specimens of business and legal letterhead from other urban centers of the industrial United States, this panel will examine and discuss: What did letterhead represent to 20th century printers in local markets such as Detroit? What is the significance of printed letterhead, and stationery, to the art of small press printing in post-industrial cities …