This dissertation investigates modernist artists and designers as they used the functional craft of woodworking to enact value for marginalized working bodies. Art historians have acknowledged self-conscious labor within modernism, mapping the ways in which work can signal class, nationalism, and technological mastery. Received histories of American modernism document a wide range of instances where painters, sculptors, and printmakers using the work of art making as a medium in and of itself. Modernist wood was another mid-twentieth-century genre for utilizing the tools and techniques of manufacturing as components of performance. This history, however, is largely ignored. Modernist woodworkers used the same strategies as their counterparts in the visual arts genres of painting, printmaking, and sculpture: they appropriated the technologies and manners of ordinary work and workers in order to enact a wide spectrum of human modalities that modernism questioned—competence, physicality, efficacy, lack of affect, hyper-masculinity, and executive control among others. This project interrogates the stakes of the hands-on work with furniture making and carpentry that modernist woodworkers performed.

The methodology that I am using is twofold: a medium-specific investigation into modernist wood that spans disciplinary boundaries of art, design, architecture, and craft; and an analytic framework of biography of practice. Each of the three main chapters for this dissertation is a case study tracing the career development of a single woodworker. The first chapter, “Molly Gregory’s Community Leadership,” investigates woodworker and educator Mary (Molly) Gregory (1914-2006) as she used cooperative woodworking projects to foster communities that were models of participatory democracy. The second chapter, “Isamu Noguchi’s Ingenuity in Representing America,” investigates designer-sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) as he used the functional craft of set building to manifest an American identity of purposeful innovation. The third chapter, “George Nakashima’s Self-Actualization,” analyzes studio furniture innovator George Nakashima (1905-1990) as he practiced furniture making as a demonstration of multicultural ambassadorship. Each chapter traces the development of an individual craft practice, excavating the timely ideals and ethics that supported the emergence of modernist wood as a viable profession.

Gregory, Noguchi, and Nakashima each turned to woodworking after having experienced race- and gender-based marginalization from the established fields of modernist art and design. Taken together, their practice elucidates modernist wood as a socially engage genre that tested the amateur craft ideal of hands-on work with wood as a venue for self-making and a crucible for leadership.

Three California potters Glen Lukens (1887-1967), Hal Riegger (1911-2005), and Rick Dillingham (1952-1994) are at the forefront of art historical interventions in the extraction of the subterranean economy. Their objects, writings, and processes dig up the complex and slippery relations of ceramic vessels to settler colonialism, industrial capitalism, and the liberation of queer personhood in the United States during the twentieth century. I take up the term “geological primitivism” to examine the ways the subjects of this dissertation negotiated their relationship to extraction and the land. Their writings and philosophies reimagined the materiality of ceramics as being ahistorical. The land is not a neutral passive subject. Embedded within its materiality are cultural histories of place and violent genocide enacted under the structure of U.S. settler colonialism. The California Design exhibition series, curated by Eudorah Moore at the Pasadena Art Museum, which featured the works of Lukens, Riegger, and Heath, alongside other artists and designers further builds upon the mythologized narrative of the land of the American West as a primordial landscape ready for cultivation and the exploitation of its natural resources.

Within the discipline of art history, the terms “outsider,” “folk,” or “self-taught” have been historically applied to artists who have worked outside of prevailing institutional structures. Such classifications have often marginalized the artistic production of untrained, working-class African American artists in the twentieth century, particularly in the Southern United States. My dissertation reframes the discussion of twentieth-century Southern black art as a thoroughly modern and contemporary phenomenon, grounded in particular material and social conditions that, far from isolated, have instead engendered rich artistic communities. It does so by taking as a case study the Birmingham-Bessemer School, a group of male artists working in postindustrial Alabama in the decades following the Civil Rights movement. Though excluded from the primary narratives of American modernism, the artistic production of Lonnie Holley (b. 1950), Thornton Dial (1928-2016), and Ronald Lockett (1965- 1998) contest received histories of modern artistic production, including, but not limited to: found object assemblage, relational art and performance, site-specific installation, and nonrepresentational painting.

First, I examine how the formal and material characteristics of work produced by the Birmingham-Bessemer School—the use of discarded and recycled materials, assemblage-like structures, and the prevalence of yard installations—are tethered to the unique environmental conditions of the greater Birmingham area as it gave rise to industry at the turn of the twentieth century. Secondly, I discuss the entry of the School’s artistic production into the predominantly white art world through museum exhibitions beginning in the 1990s. I argue that the curatorial struggle to showcase the complex social and cultural origins of their work has prevented this form of visual expression from being fully understood within the mainstream art world, as defined by prevailing institutional structures of the museum and the art market. In an effort to historically account for the Birmingham-Bessemer School, my study integrates formal analyses of artwork, artist interviews, exhibition catalogues, and media responses through the lens of queer and critical race theory. This dissertation removes Southern black art from mythologizing narratives of isolated genius or quaint, folk production, by situating it as a challenge to longstanding regional centers of modern and contemporary art in the United States.

Building on scholarship that continues to expand the cultural topography of the city, this dissertation investigates a constellation of arts organizations founded and managed by people of color in Los Angeles from 1968-1984. Arts associations such as the Black Arts Council (1968- 1972) and grassroots art spaces like Self Help Graphics (1972-present) and the Museum of African American Art (1976-present) established the artistic networks of apprenticeship, instruction and affiliation for much of the Black and Latino artistic production since the 1960s. Equal parts activist headquarters and alternative art spaces, these groups provided exhibition opportunities for Black and Latino artists and rallied significant audiences of color to financially and ideologically support their work. Groups of like-minded Black and Latino activists and artists disillusioned with the public art museum instead founded alternative art spaces in defiance of a dominant culture’s attempts at keeping aggrieved racial and ethnic communities invisible. Protesting their exclusion from the city’s main museums, these groups turned churches, street corners and parking lots into temporary exhibition spaces and art studios. Through community oriented programming and exhibition making, they generated large membership constituencies and attracted audiences that reached into the thousands. By reformatting the dominant culture’s products, these groups made art applicable and meaningful to demographic groups that the museum as an institution continues to neglect, ignore and misunderstand. Analyzed as a series of case studies, these art formations provide insights into the popular uses and re-readings of the spaces, frameworks and alliances by which art has traditionally been activated, curated, exhibited and received.

This dissertation draws on the philosophical and activist scholarship of feminist ecological thought to reimagine the disciplinary and humanist logic of the Anthropocene, with a focus on ecosexuality. I use the term “feminist ecological thought” to capture the diversity and richness of early and contemporary feminist engagement with environmental concerns, including ecofeminism, feminist new materialism, and queer ecofeminism. The capacity of feminist ecological thought to recognize the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression, including those based on gender, race, class, sexuality, and environmental degradation across both human and more-than-human bodies, makes it an urgent and timely field of inquiry for feminist studies. Through a critical reading of ecosexual artistic practice, this dissertation reveals the ways feminist ecological scholarship advances feminist thinking and environmental activism. Ecosexuality, as most visibly articulated by queer artists Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, radically reimagines our relationship with the Earth by shifting the metaphor of Earth as mother to Earth as lover. Ecosexuals are people who find nature erotic and strive to make sustainability and protecting the Earth against environmental destruction and climate change sexy, pleasurable, and abundantly joyful. The critical ethos of Sprinkle and Stephens’ brand of ecosexuality integrates sex-positive activism and environmental consciousness by asking the Earth to become a lover. Ultimately, by exploring the pleasure politics of ecosexuality, I suggest that Sprinkle and Stephens’ ecosexual performativity offers an alternative to the didacticism and the binary thinking of mainstream environmentalism, thereby transforming ecosexuality into a framework for having an embodied ecological relation with the Earth based on consent and collaboration.