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SUMMARY:Book Talk:  Uncanny Revivals: Designing an American Identity 
DESCRIPTION:December 7th\, 4:00 PM\n\n\n\nCurtin 939\n\n\n\nFree & open to the public\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUncanny Revival: Designing an American Identity is an examination of how immersive colonial revival projects contributed to the formation of a White nationalist identity by inviting viewers to step into the past. \n\n\n\nFrom 1930 to 1950\, a number of design projects in the United States appeared to bring early American history to life. Sites and artworks such as Colonial Williamsburg\, the Winterthur Museum\, the Index of American Design\, and Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s miniature period rooms created immersive fantasies of the past in which visitors seemed to have direct contact with the look and feel of history. Accessible and entertaining for general audiences\, these popular projects also had the unsettling effect of naturalizing political ideologies of racial inequality. \n\n\n\nK. L. H. Wells examines the ways that colonial revival design produced new racial identifications in which the nation’s European immigrant communities and “old stock” Americans transformed from being seen as individual groups differentiated by region\, ethnicity\, and class to a White race with shared ties to early American history. Drawing on an astonishing breadth of archival sources—including letters from designers and audiences\, working drawings and documentary photographs\, government and corporate reports\, magazine articles and newspaper reviews\, and exhibition catalogues and guidebooks—Wells offers a revelatory look at how the affective dimensions of visual and material cultures in colonial revival design contributed to the making of twentieth-century American whiteness. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Author\n\n\n\nK. L. H. Wells is associate professor of American art and architecture in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Prof. Wells’s research focuses on the politics of decorative arts and design in the United States. Her newest book\, Uncanny Revivals: Designing an American Identity (Yale University Press\, 2026) examines the uncanny aesthetics and White nationalist politics of colonial revival design during the 1930s and 1940s. The first book-length consideration of colonial revivalism in relation to race\, Uncanny Revivals does not merely critique colonial revival design for promoting White nationalist politics but examines what made these designs so ideologically effective and aesthetically popular during era of intense political polarization and economic uncertainty. In considering the politics of a revivalist art movement\, Uncanny Revivals builds on Wells’s first book\, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York (Yale University Press\, 2019)\, which examined the revival of French tapestry as a medium for modern art after World War II. Wells revealed how modernists used tapestry to expand the audience\, critical importance\, function\, and marketability of modern art in order to establish abstraction as the dominant aesthetic of American Cold War capitalism. Weaving Modernism argued that while tapestry helped modern art reach new heights\, the medium also contests many of our conventional narratives about “high” modernism in postwar New York by showing how Americans engaged with the French identity\, decorative function\, and reproductive abilities of modern art. Wells’s current research project examines how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century landscape designers used the concept of the Italian garden to establish the legitimacy of their emerging profession. Taking an ecocritical approach\, Wells compares Italian gardens in dramatically different climates across the United States to show how American landscape designers used them to emphasize the timelessness and architectural rigor of their craft.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUWM Authors in Conversation\n\n\n\nDiscover the ideas\, stories\, and scholarship of UWM authors in the humanities. \n\n\n\nThrough this series\, C21 invites UWM authors to share their newly published books with the campus community and the wider public. These conversations offer an opportunity to hear directly from authors about their work\, research\, creative processes\, and the ideas that inspire their latest publications. \n\n\n\nIf you are a UWM author with a newly published book in the humanities and would like to present your work as part of this series\, please contact Lead Faculty Advisor Anna Mansson McGinty at mansson@uwm.edu.
URL:https://uwm.edu/c21/event/book-talk-uncanny-revivals/
LOCATION:Curtin 939\, 3243 N Downer Ave\, Milwaukee\, WI\, 53211\, United States
CATEGORIES:Arts and Culture,Arts and Culture,Co-Promotional,Faculty and Staff,Faculty and Staff,Lecture,Lectures Conferences and Symposiums,Public,Public,UWM Authors in Conversation,UWM Campus Events
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