Creators and Consumers: Women and Material Culture and Visual Art in 19th-Century Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest

At the fifth biennial David B. Warren Symposium, seven scholars examined contributions made by women to the material culture of nineteenth-century Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest. The resulting papers explore such diverse topics as women’s creative enterprises in Texas, their artistic contributions, as seen in the making of fine art, quilts, sunbonnets, and memorial hairwork pieces, and their role in adapting personal spaces such as an antebellum parlor and African American homes after the Civil War.

In this volume, Mel Buchanan shares insights about the woman behind the furnishing of an important antebellum parlor. Whitney Stuart discusses Reconstruction-era African American material culture as expressed by women in their new free homes. Katherine Burlison reveals one woman’s impressive literary and artistic accomplishments in New Orleans. Katherine J. Adams provides interpretive analysis of quilts from Texas and the Lower South. The paper on sunbonnets by Rebecca Jumper Matheson provides a unique window into nineteenth-century Texas. The publication concludes with an essay by Lauren Clark focused on decorative memorial works woven of hair.