In keeping with the definitional nature of our first webinar, “What is an Historic Interior? the Design History Society’s Student Forum is hosting an event “What is a Design Historian?” with Andrea Foffa, Denise Lai, and Alex Todd. TOMMOROW EVENING 7pm GMT https://www.designhistorysociety.org/events  Read More →

HIG Members!  I am chairing a search for a colleague at the University of North Texas.  While another interiors specialist probably isn’t in the cards, we are searching broadly in the field of design history and material culture.  Please post and circulate this announcement. Best, Paula Lupkin The College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Art History, with a specialization in Design History and Material Culture. Applications are welcome from candidates with specializations from any time period or geography, complementing existing departmental faculty and college specializations in globalRead More →

In the era of Covid, we are occupying, and thinking about, interiors in new ways. HIG member Annmarie Adams reflects on the impact of Covid on interest in the field and concept of interiors in a recently published blog essay “This is Where We Live” on Parlour. Her review ranges from a recent article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, popular reactions like the “Room Rater” twitter posts on the interiors of media personalities, architectural criticism, responses by design firms, and events including the “wildly successful” inaugural HIG-SAH Connects webinar of last month. HIG is an important forum for our work as our areaRead More →

Congratulations to P.J. Carlino on an intriguing new article in the Journal of Interior Design: Tied to the Desk: The Somatic Experience of Office Work, 1870–1920 Between 1870 and 1920, American manufacturers designed furniture that re‐shaped the sensorial experience of office work. To help businesses inculcate efficient practice, furniture re‐shaped the posture of employees, programmed their actions, and determined sight lines, soundscapes, and circulation patterns. In the catalogs, textbooks, and trade journals they published, manufacturers gendered and racialized furniture and occupations. By 1920, White‐owned businesses adopted methods built upon standard mass‐produced furniture that affixed White male clerks to their desks and transferred the responsibility forRead More →

  Call for Papers Webinar: Interiors in the era of Covid19 March 2021 (date to be confirmed) Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University (UK) Submission Dates: 06 Nov – 12 Dec, 2020 Location: LONDON, United Kingdom Contact: Patricia Lara-Betancourt Email: p.lara-betancourt@kingston.ac.uk Phone: 07875201114 The Covid19 pandemic has caused people, worldwide, to be confined to their homes for extended periods of time. In addition to their traditional roles as places of refuge and nurturing, homes have had to accommodate the additional roles of schools, gymnasia, restaurants, cinemas, offices, making spaces and more. Above all, the home has been looked to as a site to support andRead More →

On October 21st HIG organized its first event, a Zoom webinar, “What is a Historic Interior?” We are so pleased to share the recording of the webinar, especially for those who were not able to join us on the 21st.  More events are in the works, and we look forward to bringing people together again soon.  https://vimeo.com/473072100 SAH Historic Interiors Affiliate Group (HIG) Roundtable: What is a Historic Interior? Program Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2020 This webinar, an SAH CONNECTS event sponsored by the newly organized SAH Historic Interiors Affiliate Group (HIG), brings together panelists from diverse fields of academia and practice to discuss a fundamental question:Read More →

RACAR, the journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada, has just released a special issue:  “Approaching Home: New Perspectives on the Domestic Interior.” Guest edited by Erin J. Campbell and Olivier Vallerand, it includes articles and book reviews across a broad chronology and global geographical scale.  Along with an introduction, it has three sections: Community, Nation-Building, and Curated Domesticities. https://www.racar-racar.com/ Congratulations to the editors, and to the authors Linda Stone-Ferrier, Angela Andersen and Can Gündüz, Francesco Freddolini, Magdalena Milosz, Marie-Ève Marchand, Mitchell B. Frank, Katherine Dennis , Katherine Lapierre, Eve Baboula, Menno Hubregtse, Marie-Paule Macdonald, John Potvin, and Colin Ripley. This is a greatRead More →

In just ten days HIG, SAH’s Historic Interiors Affiliate Group, will hold its first meeting as part of the SAH Connects.  We welcome our new members and encourage them to join us at this event: Kevin Adkisson, Enam Rabbi Adnan, Dr. Sana Al-Naimi, Matthew R. Berkley, Anne H. Bird, Catherine Boland Erkkila, Nicole Brannan, Alexis DeAtley, Sonali Dhanpal, Lauren Drapala, Tao DuFour, Susan E. Ebner, Meral Ekincioglu, James Fortuna, Annapurna Garimella, Jenny Harper, R. Grant Gilmore, Ester Harrison,  Imogen Hart, Mark Hinchman, Laura C. Jenkins, Delnaaz Kharadi, Flynn Larso, Anca Lasc, Di Luo, Paula Lupkin, Whitney Mohl, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Sonal S. Mithal, Erica Morawski, PaulRead More →

On view now at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Darren Waterston’s immersive installation Filthy Lucre “presents a detailed and decadent interpretation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s famed Peacock Room.” This artist’s engagement with a standard element of the historic interiors canon in a contemporary artwork is just one of a series of museological reconsiderations of the period room and furniture installation, including the work of Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Yinka Shonibare, and many others.      Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre was created by the artist in collaboration with MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.Read More →