Designing American Taste: Frank Alvah Parsons, Queer Pedagogy and the Development of Applied Art and Design Education in the 20th Century
This thesis seeks to understand the life and work of design educator Frank Alvah Parsons (1863-1930), Parsons School of Design’s namesake, as well as his disciples, William M. Odom and Van Day Truex. Parsons dedicated his life to democratizing design and was one of America's foremost design authorities during his lifetime. Through his leadership of what was then called the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (NYSFAA), he modernized and professionalized disciplines that had once been considered trades and popularized the idea of design education as a distinct field. In spite of this reputation, little scholarship has been devoted to Parsons’ contributions to art and design education, and his biography remains unwritten. This project will be the first to critically examine the life and work of Parsons, and his legacy in design education, with Parsons School of Design operating as the top art and design school in the United States. Specifically, this thesis interrogates how Parsons' work in the fields of interior, graphic, and fashion design defines the characteristics of an emerging modern American design taste. Parsons’ democratic, consumerist vision was that everyone could access beauty in their everyday lives by improving the decoration of their homes and their personal appearance. While Parsons met with society ladies of New York City, he also lectured to homemakers in Iowa, firmly believing that he could teach taste to all classes of Americans. Likely as a result of his own education in the second half of the 19th century, Parsons rejected the bric-a-brac of the Victorian period in favor of modern aesthetic theories emphasizing light, color, and form harmony. Chief among Parsons’ interests was the emerging science of color theory. Across Parsons’ three books, he creates experiments that he purports to carry out himself, all of which are used to better understand how color affects our emotions and perceptions of space. He believed students and companies had to make design choices backed by scientific evidence, and he elevated utility and technological innovation over old-fashioned decoration. By looking back at Parsons’ public and private writings (which have never been the object of comprehensive research), this thesis enables us to better understand how American designers were first trained in the early-20th century and how their instruction during this formative period affected the development of consumer taste in America for decades to come. Through my research, I have uncovered archival sources that reveal Parsons’ closeted sexuality and how he built a queer community through design during the early-20th century. Parsons’ personal papers do not live in any institutional archive, and what exists has been obscured or missing from established archives, at least in part because of his sexuality. Because of this, I have taken on the role of creating an archive of Parsons’ papers and personal effects, given that he had no heirs. This body of work details not only the story of Parsons’ life, but illustrates a larger historical connection between design education and sexuality. When beginning his career in design education, Parsons struggled to gain employment at Teachers College (Columbia University), as he was branded by administrators with the codewords “frivolous” and “vain.” One of Parsons’ protégés, Van Day Truex, recalled how many of the faculty Parsons hired were openly gay or lesbian. At a time when homosexuality was illegal, the NYSFAA became a site of queer community and pedagogy. Years later, when Truex took over as director, he created scholarships for men who were dishonorably discharged from the military at a time when queer students and faculty were expelled from other American universities. This analysis and reclaiming of Parsons’ sexuality is important as Parsons’ queerness shaped his pedagogical practice. Deeply impacted by queer taste and striving to change the taste of a nation, this thesis demonstrates how the heteronormative public admired Parsons, but were unaware that their newly found sense of beauty was intimately connected to the nascent aesthetic codes of homosexuality. This thesis seeks to overturn the received histories of U.S. modern design that tend to begin with the arrival of Bauhaus émigrés by putting three of its most influential early educators at the center of the story. While all three men created their own legacy (Parsons created the school, Odom wrote a still definitive two-volume text on the history of Italian furniture, and Truex became the creative director of Tiffany’s), their contributions have been nearly forgotten. In finding silenced voices among the archives, I demonstrate how these queer art and design educators professionalized art and design education, built a formative institution, used the university as a site of queer lineage and queer pedagogy, and shaped the taste of a nation.
design history, queer history, biography, design education, public history, institutional history
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