Designing American Taste: Frank Alvah Parsons, Queer Pedagogy and the Development of Applied Art and Design Education in the 20th Century
type: CreativeWork
description: 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…
abstract: 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…
author: Rottman, Molly
language: eng
keywords: design history, queer history, biography, design education, public history, institutional history
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/827a0dc5-0f6b-43a8-a2c8-492678d056d9/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2024-08-22
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:28Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.116752