Texas Tech University

Carol Flueckiger, Associate Professor in Art, was awarded a Creative Artist Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, a research library in Worcester, Massachusetts,  which houses collections from colonial times through the civil war and reconstruction. Her task was to gather imagery with the intent to blueprint vintage graphics and historic handwriting into paintings.

Flueckiger focused on handwritten letters from the first wave of feminism as it was born out of the abolitionist movement- Frederic Douglas and Harriet Beecher Stowe and more.  Her finds included vintage paper dolls like Eva and Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, dairies, and drawings of the era. Many of these papers were made from rags which were made of cotton. She, then investigated cotton which took her, of course, to Texas which caused her to explore vintage maps and her investigations just went on.

For her art, she used a process of cyanotype to blueprint historic imagery into oversize paintings. As she collected and digitized for her art, she found that this period of time was ripe with information and advice on how things should be done  and thought about from tobacco to religion to marriage and divorce. She found one article that even brought up ladies’ underwear entitled, “Corsets versus Brain.”