Pots, potters, and patrons: The ethnography, history, and meaning of contemporary Pennsylvania redware

This work is about the meaning of contemporary redware and the lives of its makers. The lead-glazed earthenwares that influenced New World traditions were developing in central Europe by the mid-sixteenth century. Immigrant craftsworkers, primarily from the German-speaking regions of the Continent as well as Great Britain, carried methods and motifs across the Atlantic. Today's redware producers are small in number, but they play a major role in the contemporary market for the handmade.;Ethnographies of three contemporary Pennsylvania potteries, with comparative material from one Ohio pottery, form the core of this work. Participant observation, life history interviews, vessel studies, and analysis of production are used to examine craftsworkers' daily lives. Consumer surveys and close analysis of shows and marketing yield a unique understanding of the redware audience. The dialogic relationship between handmade objects versus products of industrialization runs as a theme throughout research. Potters' motivations for producing a craft that exists as a twentieth century anomaly are revealed. A reflexive approach to research and writing communicates the subjective fieldwork experience.;Redware was a necessity of daily life in Pennsylvania from seventeenth century settlements through the mid-nineteenth century. Among Pennsylvania Germans, decorative wares were presented as gifts marking rites of passage. Redware slowly fell into disuse over the course of the 1800s. By the fin de siecle it was rediscovered by collectors who eventually elevated it to one of America's classic "folk art" forms. Redware thus achieved a shift in status from an essential artifact of household and agricultural life to a luxury commodity.;"Traditionality" and "authenticity" as viewed by potters and patrons, are discussed as interpretive processes and perceptual constructs subjectively grounded in the present. Redware is used as a vehicle to explore these concepts vis a vis the place of handmade objects in technologically advanced Western society where it has been assimilated into the "American country style" of decorating domestic interiors. This analysis contributes to understanding today's taste for the handmade with its historical antecedents in the Arts and Crafts movement and age-old romantic ideals.