“Women, Art, and Social Change: The Newcomb Pottery Enterprise”
The Newcomb Pottery, active in New Orleans from 1895 to 1940, has long been regarded as one of the premier producers of American Arts and Crafts pottery. In addition, from its origins it attracted attention because all of its workers were women. The pottery was a division of Newcomb College, the women’s college attached to Tulane University. The exhibition “Women, Art, and Social Change,” co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane, brings together more than 125 objects for this traveling tour, which began in New Orleans in 2013 and concludes this October in Nashville. The objects in the exhibition are uniformly stunning. Best-in-show may be the lamp that, in the installation at the Princeton University Art Museum in summer 2016, greeted visitors as they entered the galleries. The lamp’s base, in shades of yellow and green, features a repeated motif of cat’s claw flowers, while the cunningly designed shade, an irregular swirling outline of magnolia