NEWCOMB COLLEGE POTTERY, ARTS AND CRAFTS, AND THE NEW SOUTH

Abstract

In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.