From Zuni to Dupont Circle: Isabel and Larz Anderson’s Native American Collection

Description

This scholarly article is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between an art historian, Isabel L. Taube, who specializes in actual and represented interiors, and an independent scholar, Stephen T. (Skip) Moskey. Moskey is a specialist in the history of nineteenth-century Washington, DC, and who wrote a biography of Isabel and Larz Anderson and edited the letters of Larz’s mother, Elizabeth Kilgour Anderson.

This digital art history project analyzes the display of Native American pottery and weavings from the US Southwest in the Washington, DC, home of a wealthy, well-connected, worldly, and intellectually curious couple, Isabel and Larz Anderson, in the first decade of the twentieth century. It contends that these objects were presented by the Andersons in eclectic arrangements designed to authenticate their cosmopolitanism and to facilitate their advancement in white, elite social and political circles. The article, which analyzes how the Andersons refigured the pots and blankets in their home, is expanded and more fully illustrated in an interactive digital tour of Anderson House that reveals the broader domestic and social context in which the Native objects appeared.