Glass House: 2023

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I was introduced to the work of midcentury industrial designer Freda Diamond while conducting research for my previous watercolor series, Juiced, which depicts midcentury juice glassware. Diamond, who drafted designs for everything from lampshades to TV trays, created demand for now-iconic decorative elements of the American home. She worked for Libbey Glass from 1942-1979, creating over 80 lines of glassware for the company, many of which remain, independent of their creator, cultural touchstones of aspirational midcentury leisure culture, ie: my grandmother had this set in her house!

Once mass produced and sold in groupings of 8 for $1.50, the “Hostess sets” Diamond popularized have become sought after commodities sold as incomplete sets on resale websites for 120x+ their original sales price. The removal of these functional objects from their intended use calls into question planned obsolesce. Painting from found photography I edited, these paintings layer pattern and shadow, combining realism and abstraction within a single work.

With material culture, especially pieces designed for service, the designer is often forgotten or unknown. But Diamond was a respected tastemaker of her time: her glass designs were added to the MoMA permanent collection in 1952, she was recorded in a 1954 Life magazine as having “done more to get simple, well-styled furnishings into every room of the average U.S. home than any other designer” and declared “famous home furnishing stylist and consultant” in Libbey’s ads for decades. She was also a woman and a Jew at time where very few of either of those groups reached a celebrated status. This series of watercolor paintings is an homage to Diamond’s trailblazing accomplishments as much as it is a rumination on the assimilation and therefore erasure of contributions of American Jews throughout the twentieth century.