Dec 2010:

Signage as an issue in Historic Preservation; Talk given at the Providence Preservation Society

On Dec 4, 2010, Nancy Austin gave a talk on the early history of signage in Providence and the little-known artistic dynasty of the Bowers who created most Providence signage for over a century. Her focus was on the period 1760-1860 when Providence was nationally renowned for the artistic quality of its urban signage. She will pay tribute to the preservation-minded citizens of late nineteenth-century Providence who worked hard to document this heritage that they saw slipping away, unacknowledged and barely preserved. Nancy Austin will conclude with a look at signage as a current issue in historic preservation.

Nov 2011 pending acceptance - Paper proposal for the American Antiquarian - CHAViC conference on Advertising in Early America:

What Kind of Object? Streetscape Signage Design in Providence, RI: a Case Study of the Bower Family, c.1770-1890

Nancy Austin, Independent Scholar (Newport, RI)

“I had been at Providence - had seen the signs there, and those were the only marvels in painting that I saw til I was twenty... “ William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Development of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834)

This paper highlights the successful identity formation of the American artist in contrast to the under-researched social actor I will call the streetscape signage designer. One could address this problem by looking at the career of Benjamin West, who was both a commercial sign painter and a successful, and now canonical, American artist. This paper takes a different, broader approach by presenting a case study of three generations of a family of sign makers that dominated streetscape advertising in Providence, Rhode Island from c.1770-1890. Active in Providence by the early 1770s, the Dutch-born John Bower was described as one of the most famous wood carvers in America. His commissioned three-dimensional public sculptures, such as the “Sign of the Turks Head”, were moveable place-makers that defined the people’s urban spatial psycho-geography with a memory lasting to the present.

The work of his son, Samuel J. Bower (1797-1860) could be seen “on almost every building in town” and underscores the shift from three-dimensional to two-dimensional street advertising that took place in the early nineteenth century and the subtle adjustments in the design of building facades that were necessary to accommodate new two-dimensional advertising signage. This paper will propose that the decline of three-dimensional, representational, place-making “advertising” signage and the introduction of mandatory street numbers for all shops and houses in Providence in 1828 should be understood within the anti-Masonic concerns over the semiotics of coded signs after the 1826 Morgan Affair. The Bowers and other Providence sign makers had been Masons, and their business portfolios amply included providing the “signage” for Masonic spaces and ritual objects until 1826-28.

In the 1820s, Samuel Bower’s scope of work included shop signs, Masonic ritual objects, and visual branding for patriotic voluntary organizations in need of public banners and logos. Such commissions included the surviving banner for the 1826 “Burning of the Gaspee” event held in Pawtuxet, RI on the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. These jobs were done in tandem with Bower’s participation as an artist in the first art exhibition ever held in Providence, in 1829, as well as the later art exhibitions and drawing classes sponsored by the pioneering Rhode Island Art Association in the 1850s.

When Samuel’s son, William E. Bower, died in 1893, a Providence historian lamented that this was the first time in over a century that no Bower was making the signs that defined the material cultural of the urban landscape. Twice in the nineteenth century, Rhode Island historians acting as proto-historic preservationists urged that the Bower family’s oeuvre and other examples of local streetscape signage be collected and preserved before it was too late. But these pleas for valuing signage as a legitimate artifact worthy of preservation fell on deaf ears, and by and large it is only the art work of Samuel’s other son, John Bower - who made a career as a painter - which has survived and is currently traded in the Art market. By contrast, in 2010, not one RI historian, antiquarian, curator, or preservationist I contacted had ever heard of the Bower family of sign makers, and almost none of three generation of their work has survived. None of the Bowers’ limited surviving work is on exhibition, nor their legacy known.

Dunlap’s comments in 1834, and that of other later nineteenth century historians, should alert us to the fact that the work of early American Providence sign painters was neither primitive folk art nor fine art nor insignificant advertising ephemera. This body of lost two- and three-dimensional streetscape signage reveals an under-theorized realm of nineteenth century American visual culture, with much to tell us about the world of advertising, the world of art, and how those domains became magnetically polarized by the 1890s.