The Craftsman’s Wife
An ongoing, living design artifact which will continue to be updated with stories, artists, works, and research.The premise of this website and archive is to share the stories, names, information, and resources associated with women throughout art history whose stories have been underrepresented and in some cases, almost entirely erased.
At one point during junior year I was reading Giambattista Bodoni’s Wikipedia page. I don’t remember what brought me there, but it ended up being a moment that was burned in my memory. Bodoni’s influence on type design is evident in drop-down font selection menus everywhere. You’ve seen his work on the Washington Post and the Mamma Mia! poster, and most design students have studied his work at some point during their education. Something that isn’t so well known, however, is that Bodoni died before he could finish his most important publication, Manuale Typografia. The wikipedia page states,
“It would be up to Bodoni's widow to complete the series. Margherita Dall’Aglio Bodoni picked up where her husband left off, completed the French classics, and then five years after Bodoni died, published the Manuale typografico of 1818, the specimen book to end all specimen books. Published in two volumes, it was over 600 pages long and contained 265 pages of roman characters, “imperceptibly declining in size, romans, italics, and script types, and the series of 125 capital letters; 181 pages of Greek and Oriental char- acters; 1036 decorations and 31 borders; followed in the last 20 pages by symbols, ciphers, numerals, and musical examples. ”
The fact that up until reading this wikipedia page I had heard and learned a good deal about Bodoni and his work, and yet not once heard mention of Margherita was unsettling and stuck with me. So I started by simply searching her name in google, then the VCU databases, and this lead to me scouring the internet for any mention of her. Despite being an integral part of Bodoni’s legacy and thus a printer herself, Margherita Dall’Aglio Bodoni is pretty much summed up in that paragraph on Wikipedia. This was incredibly disappointing, and made me wonder whether there were other female artists whose contributions to our history were lost, overshadowed by their male counterparts.
“The Craftsman’s Wife” is an investigation into these women in an effort to share their stories and give them recognition free of their male creative counterparts, as well as a general commentary on the challenges and overshadowing faced by women in the creative fields. There still exists this tendency to diminish the accomplishments of women and POC, whether it be by viewing their work as less serious credit or by crediting it to some extent to the man in their life. I hope to counteract that myth.
Though the Craftsman’s wife began with women such as Mararita Bodoni, Alice Neel, Sarah Eaves, Dora Maar, Jo Hopper, and Celia Paul—who were in romantic and creative partnerships with men, where said partners played a role in masking their accomplishments— I expanded the archive to include artists who I felt the general public and art students should be more aware of.
* ARTISTS *
* RESOURCES *
some links may be temporarily out of order as the site is moving from an old domain. come back soon!