First Wave Feminism & the Ecology of Culture in Antebellum RI
Nancy Austin, Independent Scholar, Newport, RI
www.austinalchemy.com

This paper is a microhistory of how art and design became gendered; it is a case study of art and design in Rhode Island and the time period between 1848 and the consolidation of art history as a discipline in the twentieth century.

Between 1848 and 1852, the first three design schools in America were opened by women for women in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. More cities founded design schools for both men and women in the years and decades that followed, including Providence, RI where women founded the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1877. First Wave Feminism & the Ecology of Culture in Antebellum Rhode Island documents how the promise of these first design schools for women impacted the ecology of culture in Rhode Island from the founding of the important Rhode Island Art Association in 1853 to the establishment of the state’s first art museum in the 1890s at a design school and the subsequent introduction of art history into the RISD curriculum in the twentieth century, even as many other historic nineteenth-century American design schools transformed into art schools. After 1945, industrial design’s American history was re-situated as beginning in the 1930s and was all about men, as it mostly remains to this day. It is my contention that our understanding of art history as a discipline needs to be further contextualized within the promise that the founding of nineteenth-century American design schools held for "First Wave" women.

The focus of my paper will be a feminist reading of the Rhode Island Art Association, previously understood as the domain of powerful rising merchant men who staged two major loan exhibitions (1854, 1855), bought an Asher B. Durand painting (1855), and consistently failed (from 1853-1894) to found either the design school or art museum defined in their mission statement.  Instead, we should look again at the resonating 1854 Rhode Island Art Association exhibition and recognize it as a historic showcase for women as artists, patrons, and political activists. At least thirty women were patrons loaning art from their own collections in 1854. This was only the second American exhibition of work by the emerging international artist, Rosa Bonheur. It included paintings by Jane Stuart, the self-supporting Newport artist and daughter of Gilbert Stuart; a portrait of the path-breaking artist, Angelica Kauffmann; and work from the estate of Sarah Wickes Lippitt (1789-1847), a Rhode Island artist who had trained in Italy and exhibited six paintings at the very first large exhibition held in Rhode Island, in 1829.

The antebellum Rhode Island Art Association was an arena of great concern to first wave feminist Paulina Wright Davis who was writing and publishing the Una this very moment in Providence, RI. The exhibition contributors included Davis and I believe Davis’s close friend, Lucy Stone, with whom she had organized the epochal first National Woman’s Rights Convention in neighboring Worcester, in 1850. At the RIAA exhibition opening, Davis records that the RIAA president was proud to preside over a society in which women had equal rights. Davis, or presumably Stone, was asked to address the mixed sex exhibition opening.

For the 1854 RIAA exhibition, Paulina Wright Davis loaned two portrait busts from her collection by the sculptor Benjamin Paul Akers (1825-1861). Paulina Wright Davis was a lifelong supporter of Akers, whom she brought to Providence in the summer of 1854, and with whom she later traveled to Europe. Indeed, it was her contacts that brought Akers his Washington, D.C. commissions while Mrs. Davis's husband, the abolitionist Thomas Davis, was in Congress.  For the 1854 RIAA exhibition, Paulina Wright Davis loaned portrait busts by Akers that carried riveting political overtones in the years before the Civil War. One was a portrait of the famous abolitionist, Gerritt Smith.  The other bust was of Supreme Court Justice John McLean (Collection of the U.S. Supreme Court), a Justice remembered today as among the “most politically conscious...in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court” and the dissenting voice in the Dred Scott case of 1856-7. 

The Rhode Island Art Association was trailblazing in its origins.  It is clear now why the antebellum RIAA echoed across the century in RI discussions about the what and why of establishing a design school and art museum in Rhode Island – even if it has been later misinterpreted as to what this resonance was remembering. A history of the RIAA contributes to our understanding of what creative spaces were open to men and women before the Civil War. The expansive possibilities for American women implied by "design" is an important dialectic to consider as we rewrite the history of men professionalizing art and the discipline of art history.