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  • Creators and Consumers: Women and Material Culture and Visual Art in 19th-Century Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest by David B. Warren Symposium
  • Lydia Mattice Brandt
Creators and Consumers: Women and Material Culture and Visual Art in 19th-Century Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest. David B. Warren Symposium, Volume 5. ( Houston: Distributed by Yale University Press for Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2016. Pp. xii, 140. Paper, ISBN 978-0-89090-189-2.)

Whether presiding over a plantation, reuniting families after emancipation, or braving the difficulties of the frontier, women in the nineteenth-century South used objects to declare agency and to shape identity. Creators and Consumers: Women and Material Culture and Visual Art in 19th-Century Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest, a series of seven essays resulting from the fifth biennial David B. Warren Symposium held by the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, positions southern women and their objects in a national context as well as in their immediate, local vernaculars.

The essays in Creators and Consumers ably demonstrate the great variety of ways that women made, bought, arranged, and embedded great meaning in material culture in the pre-1900 lower South. In some cases, objects were vehicles for transcending social assumptions about gender, race, or class; in others, they were a means of reinforcing them. Paula Marks's essay, well placed at the start of the book, reveals how women used sewing to improve their families' economic situations, to ensure financial independence from men, and to establish careers as fine artists in competition with male talent. Mel Buchanan's essay zeroes in on how an indelible Louisiana plantation owner, Harriet Flower Mathews, used the furnishing of her fashionable parlor to visually reinforce her control over the family's empire. Whitney Nell Stewart convincingly illustrates how newly emancipated African American women arranged and outfitted domestic spaces to reclaim the humanity that their former masters had denied them. Katherine J. Adams and Lauren Clark explain how women, without suffrage and many other legal rights, infused everything from quilts to hair wreaths with their political opinions. From beds to parlor walls, women's views were seen and heard.

While some of these women were wealthy and influential, many were not. Creators and Consumers delves into the everyday lives of women who are usually left out of the history books, elevating and validating their experiences [End Page 450] and craft. In the process, the essays provide terrific examples of how to research vernacular material culture and prove that objects often offer evidence superior to traditional, text-based sources. Many of the essays focus on the contents of small, family collections to draw conclusions with regional and even national importance. Buchanan interrogates an astoundingly intact collection of parlor furnishings and textiles that was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art; Katherine Burlison combs through a group of artifacts that belonged to a single family and are now housed at the Louisiana State Museum; and Adams investigates items from the Winedale Quilt Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Paying homage to the legacy of Ima Hogg, the founder of Bayou Bend, these essays remind readers of the untapped resources stowed away in attics and basements and of the importance of local and state institutions for preserving and interpreting them.

While the essays clearly argue for the value of women's labor in creating material culture, they usually miss the opportunity to position the objects and their makers in the context of the daily challenges of nineteenth-century life. Considering the work involved in maintaining objects after their creation is essential to situating these women in their places and times and interpreting material culture differently than fine art. Rebecca Jumper Matheson's essay is the exception, noting that "slat bonnets were the simplest style of sunbonnet to make and launder" in order to explain many women's motivation for choosing that style (p. 105, emphasis in original). Matheson's observation prompted this reviewer to consider how a quilt maker might choose fabrics based on how they would be cleaned and whether Harriet...

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