L’articolo “The Straw Donkey”:

Lisa Hockemeyer

Lisa Hockemeyer Politecnico di Milano https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3160-2245

Keywords: 1950s, Furniture, Design History, Italy, Penny Sparke, Crafts History, Tradition

Abstract

It was 1998 when the seminal paper The Straw Donkey: Tourist Kitsch or Proto-Design? Craft and Design in Italy, 1945-1960 by Britain’s eminent design historian Penny Sparke was published for the first time in the British «Journal of Design History». As its witty title suggested, the paper took as its starting point a small toy straw donkey, illustrated in the pages of the catalogue that accompanied Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today exhibition that was hosted by the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts in New York in 1949 before touring to eleven more venues all over America. Although over fifteen years have passed since, this paper – which is being re-published in the Italian translation in this issue of «AIS/Design Journal. Storia e Ricerche» – has lost nothing of its relevance to the design historian since.

Author Biography

Lisa Hockemeyer, Politecnico di Milano

Born in Bremen, Germany, in 1972, Lisa Hockemeyer is an art and design historian. Graduated from University College London, she earned a master's degree from the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a PhD at Kingston University, London. She is currently the coordinator of the Product and Accessory Design programmes at the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, and lecturer at the Polytechnic of Milan. Between 1999 and 2005 she taught History of Design at the Universities of Kent and Bedfordshire and at the Design Museum in London. Hockemeyer carries out multi- and interdisciplinary research, particularly on design, material culture, and German and Italian art of the twentieth century. She has been appointed curator of the German section of the forthcoming exhibition Design the Female Way - Creativity in Comparison, dedicated to craftsmanship and design by women from different European countries, which will be staged at the Expo 2015. Her recent publications include The Hockemeyer Collection: 20th Century Italian Ceramic Art (Hirmer, 2009) and Manufactured Identities: Ceramics and the Making of (Made in) Italy in the book Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury, 2013). Consultant and curator of art galleries and private collections, Hockemeyer curated the exhibition Terra Incognita: Italy's Ceramic Revival at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London (2009).

The Straw Donkey Paper

A Re-discovery of an Exhibition

Abstract

Author Biography