Potato Masher c. 1940

Clarence W. Dawson rendered this "Potato Masher" in either watercolor, graphite, or colored pencil. It is an homage to a humble, handmade kitchen tool. Dawson was part of the Index of American Design, a program created during the Great Depression that employed artists to document American material culture. The project sought to preserve images of everyday objects, particularly those associated with rural and folk traditions. While ostensibly about preservation, the IAD was deeply inflected by anxieties around gender and labor. It subtly affirmed a cultural preference for the presumed authenticity of pre-industrial, white, rural America. The masher, an object used primarily by women, becomes a symbol of a vanishing domesticity and the "traditional" roles associated with it. Dawson's careful rendering elevates a common tool to a cultural artifact, a tangible link to an imagined past, laden with sentimental ideas about gender, class, and labor.