Pitchers of American Life
Regular price
€31.99
A01=Ezra Shales
America
art
Author_Ezra Shales
autobiography
Category=AGA
Category=AK
Category=WF
craft
culture
design
drinking
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_crafts-hobbies
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
history
jars
material culture
pitcher
USA
vessels
Product details
- ISBN 9781350386709
- Weight: 880g
- Dimensions: 188 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 19 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Through an exploration of the tactile pleasures of drinking vessels, Pitchers of American Life traces the role of these objects as representative art and collective tools—episodes of American history that resonate today in our everyday lives and yearnings for sociability and communion.
Generously illustrated, and richly woven with personal memoir, discussion ranges from vessels within ancient cultures and religious and family rituals to the growth of mass production and contemporary consumer culture. Shales blends the social histories of art/artifacts with memories of working on a museum installation crew, as an educator, and as a shopper; in each chapter he interprets a single object as a revealing time capsule.
Ezra Shales is Professor in the History of Art department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA. He teaches craft and design history and is the author of The Shape of Craft (2017) and Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010). He has also contributed chapters to publications such as Craft Economies (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Ceramics Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has written widely on contemporary artists and modernist ceramicists, and his work has appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals such as Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Craft.
