Feminist and LGBTQ+ Studies

Abstract

This presentation will address my artistic practice that involves intensive object studies of historical furniture from my ancestral and vocational lineage. I focus on feminized forms with the aim of
reclaiming them from the world of male production where they conitinue to receive most of theirscholarly attention. Using a Prownian style analysis (refering to Jules David Prown, prominent
Material Culture scholar), I consider the furniture in the domestic, feminine world of its use, exploring metaphors inherent in its physical structure and social relevance, and unpacking latent
meanings and subtexts embedded in the forms. My most recent body of work, Suite Américaine, investigates three early American forms: a late seventeenth-century dowry chest, a mid-eighteenth
century Queen Anne style lady’s writing desk, and a late eighteenth century federal lady’s worktable. I interpret the forms as “proto-feminist” furniture in order to explore and celebrate the female agency they once empowered in the facilitation and storage of work by female hands, challenging the Puritan, patriarchal mindset that conceived of and produced them. As I consider
attitudes towards women’s role in the very precarious event of childbirth in colonial America, I make connections to the rhetoric being used in contemporary cultural debates around marriage,
procreation, and reproduction; issues that revolve around women’s rights as human rights, gender identity, and boundaries and borders. While considering these themes in the artwork I produce, I
grapple with my own family history and my place in the traditionally male dominated world of woodworking. 

Biography

BA Harrington received her traditional training in Furniture-making at the North Bennet Street School in Boston and holds an M.F.A. in Wood, and a Master’s Degree in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded the 2021 inaugural Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship from the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues across the U.S. and in Austria and China. BA is currently Professor of Woodworking in the department of Art and Design and Director of The Wood Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.