"I like decorative arts when they're so strange,' says Suzanne Karr, the art history and visual art major who saw artistic beauty as well as abuse in the artificial-flower trade
The cheery up-tempo arrangement of Bobby Darin's 1960 hit "Artificial Flowers" belies the tragic plight of the song's heroine - a flower-making orphan who dies from exposure in an unheated garret above the street corner where she sells her wares.
There's no missing that tragic image in the new exhibit from student Suzanne Karr, an art history and visual art major who has explored the history, manufacture and use of artificial flowers from the Victorian era to modern times for her senior exhibition project on display through Dec. 2 in the Rockefeller Library.
While Karr's exhibit is intriguing and colorful, she clearly demonstrates the darker side of Victorian flower-making as well as the artistic beauty of its products. Darin's 45 rpm record is part of her exhibit, set among photos, writings and other relics that document the child and adult labor abuses of the 19th and early 20th centuries in America and Europe. As a cottage industry and in factories, the artificial flower industry played a role in that abuse - and in a wider revolution.
"The seemingly innocuous flower trade actually threatened to subvert the domesticity of the lower-class Victorian wife and mother by taking her out of the home or, worse, (by disrupting) it and bringing labor into that sacred sphere," according to Karr.
Karr began researching her project two years ago after Visual Art Professor Richard Fishman bought flower-making machines, a supply of leftover crepe paper and several dozen flower samples from the California Artificial Flower Company when the Providence firm went out of business. Karr saw the equipment and the flowers - and was inspired.
"I was looking for a challenge, and I like decorative arts when they're so strange," she said.
Indeed, among the items on exhibit are flowers made from human hair - hair sometimes collected from various members of the same family in a ceramic "hair receiver." Hair flowers and other artificial blossoms were part of "Victorian mourning chic" and often used to decorate a family's crypt, said Karr.
Then there's Karr's display of the artificial flower adornments used for women and horses - accessories that were "disturbingly similar," she noted.
The use of artificial flowers dates back 25 centuries B.C., but their popularity reached its zenith in the Victorian era, when they decorated parlors and inspired World Fair displays, according to Karr. These enduring flowers were made of paper, cloth and wax - as well as hair and other eccentric materials like feathers and fish scales.
Karr's exhibit also includes her own artwork: an oil rendering of a very live Sarah Bernhardt lying in a coffin amid fake flowers, taken from a popular postcard of her era; a waxed flower bedecked shrine to Queen Victoria; a domed arrangement of waxed and beaded flowers.
According to Fishman, Karr's ambitious project required extensive research and preparation. While most studio art students mount a senior exhibit of their work, her dual concentration led her in different directions.
"This is very unusual, but it's indicative of a joint major like hers," Fishman said. "She's done an extraordinary job. She's very ambitious."
Karr - who says she's been "in and out of museums since the womb" - plans to further her studies of Baroque and Renaissance art history in graduate school and hopes to work eventually as a curator. In the meantime, she may rely on her artificial flower research for one more project.
"I may end up having to write a book on this at some point," she said.
The exhibit is on display in the lower level of the Rockefeller Library outside the Absolute Quiet room.