Skip to Content
  • email eshales@massart.edu
  • phone (617) 879-7575
  • education
    • PhD Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture
    • MFA Hunter College
    • BA Wesleyan University

Industry Experience

Curatorial Projects

Publications

  • 2017 – “Throwing the Potter’s Wheel (and Women) Back into Modernism: Reconsidering Edith Heath, Karen Karnes, and Toshiko Takaezu as Canonical Figures” in Ceramics in America 2016, (2017): 2-30
  • 2016 – “Craft” in Textile Terms: A Glossary, ed. Reineke, Röhl, Kapustka and Weddigen (Edition Immorde, Berlin, 2016), 53-56
  • 2015 – “Eva Zeisel Recontextualized, Again: Savoring Sentimental Historicism in Tomorrow’s Classic Today,” Journal of Modern Craft vol. 8, no. 2 (November 2015): 155-166
  • 2015 – O Pioneers! Women Ceramic Artists, 1925-1960, editor, organizer, and essayist (Alfred University, 2015)
  • 2015 – “Influence and Evolution: Fiber Sculpture…then and now,” browngrotta arts (2015)
  • 2015 – “The Politics of ‘Ordinary Manufacture’ and the Perils of Self-Serve Craft,” Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2015), 204-221
  • 2014 – “Where What’s Done Comes Undone (Is a Museum),” online series, Ceramics in the Expanded Field (June 2013) Republished in Studio Potter, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 2014): 72-76
  • 2013 – “Mass Production as an Academic Imaginary,” Journal of Modern Craft vol. 6, no. 3 (November 2013): 267-274
  • 2013 – “Tall Oaks Grow from Acorn Mush,” Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft’s “Object Focus: The Bowl,” 2013
  • 2012 – “A ‘Little Journey’ to Empathize with (and Complicate) the Factory,” Design & Culture vol. 4, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 215-220
  • 2011 – “Corporate Craft: Constructing the Empire State Building,” Journal of Modern Craft vol. 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 119-145
  • 2010 – Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (Rutgers University Press, 2010)

Awards and Honors

  • 2013 – MassArt Foundation Faculty Fellow Award
  • 2011 – New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Authors Award for Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era
  • 2010 – Joseph Kruson Award for Excellence in Teaching, Alfred University
  • 2010 – Alfred University Service Learning Grant,
  • 2010 – Emerging Scholars Award, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
  • 2009 – Society for the Preservation of American Modernists
  • 2009 – Windgate Foundation Publication Grant

Professional Affiliations

  • Founding member of “The Commonwealth of Craft” (a working consortium of museums, schools and organizations in Boston whose missions engage with contemporary craft)
  • Founding Member, Boston chapter of the Guild of Admirers of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers and Potters
  • College Art Association
  • Design Studies Forum (CAA affiliate)
  • Society for the History of Technology
  • American Association of Museums
  • Design History Society (UK)
  • Victorian Society of America
image description
621 Huntington Ave,
Boston, MA 02115

(617) 879-7000