Jo Briggs – författare

The first comprehensive study of the most important ceramic innovation of the 19th centuryColorful, wildly imaginative, and technically innovative, majolica was functional and aesthetic ceramic ware. Its subject matter reflects a range of 19th-century preoccupations, from botany and zoology to popular humor and the macabre. Majolica Mania examines the medium’s considerable impact, from wares used in domestic settings to monumental pieces at the World’s Fairs. Essays by international  experts address the extensive output of the originators and manufacturers in England—including Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones—and the migration of English craftsmen to the U.S. New research including information on important American makers in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia is also featured. Fully illustrated, the book is enlivened by new photography of pieces from major museums and private collections in the U.S. and Great Britain.Distributed for Bard Graduate CenterExhibition Schedule:Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York(September 24, 2021–January 2, 2022)Walters Art Museum, Baltimore(February 26–July 31, 2022)Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent(October 15, 2022–February 26, 2023)

Novelty fair examines mid-nineteenth-century people, things and places generally understood to be discrete and unrelated: urban fairs and the Great Exhibition, daguerreotypes and ballads, satirical shilling books and government-backed design reform, blackface performers and middle-class paterfamilias. A range of new and neglected sources, drawn mainly from popular culture are used to inform the discussion. The pivotal years between Chartism and the Great Exhibition emerge as far more contested than has previously been recognised and bourgeois forms and strategies are revealed as being under stress in a period that has been seen as a triumphant one for that class. Novelty fair will be of special interest to historians of Chartism, cultural historians interested in the Great Exhibition and design reform and those in the field of Victorian studies, cultural studies and visual culture more generally.