Vanity & Vice: American Art Deco
Vanity & Vice: American Art Deco
Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art
1201 Bannock Street, Denver, CO 80204
May 22, 2024–January 12, 2025
Admission: $19-$30 (ages 13+ only); free for members and youth ages 13-18
Review by Nina Peterson
In its selection of objects and its own design, the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art presents the simplicity and curvilinear geometry characteristic of Art Deco, an art style popular during the 1920s and ‘30s. Curated by Becca Goodrum, Kirkland’s Curatorial Associate, the exhibition uses gender as a lens to view the trappings of social life in the United States during Prohibition.
An installation view of the Vanity section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
Prohibition made the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages illegal between 1920 and 1933. Playfully centering on a fictional woman named Mabel, Vanity & Vice displays objects created exclusively during this period including cosmetics containers, clothing, barware, and light fixtures.
An installation view of the Vice section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
The exhibition features two distinct gallery spaces: one evokes a dressing area, the other recreates a bar. These spaces—the boudoir and a speakeasy—provide an absorptive experience that invites imaginative connection with Mabel and with the objects on view. Concise interpretive materials creatively distill the histories of Art Deco design, manufacture, and cultural consumption. This informational refinement constitutes both a strength and a limitation of the show. It allows visitors to freely dream up Mabel. But it also generalizes the political and social factors that shaped actual women’s lives during the interwar years.
An installation view of the wall text and cosmetics containers in the Vanity section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
Vanity & Vice includes a small number of succinct wall texts. No object labels appear next to the artworks. These choices enable visitors to envision the darkened galleries as a domestic setting for the shaping of personal image and as a public venue for socializing and imbibing. A twenty-minute audio tour narrated by Goodrum helps visitors relate to Mabel. In it, voice actors exuberantly use slang from the time to perform as Mabel, a speakeasy door attendant, and a bartender.
An installation view of the dressing table and bench designed by Paul Frankl in the Vanity section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
Strategically configured sightlines designate a clear path through the exhibition space. In the boudoir, a circular mirror hangs above a vanity that displays perfume bottles and cosmetic containers. The dressing table, a Paul Frankl skyscraper modular cabinet, is paired with a bench also designed by Frankl. The bench stands askew, as if Mabel has just stood up from it.
When standing in front of the vanity, visitors can see themselves reflected next to the mannequins wearing dresses loaned from the History Colorado Center. This layout positions the mirror at an angle to reflectively join museumgoers and wardrobe. It cues visitors to picture themselves as participants in Prohibition-era jaunts—we see ourselves standing next to Mabel.
A view of the outfits on display in the Vanity section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
This architectural cue finds a pedagogical echo in the wall text that asks, “Which outfit would you choose for Mabel’s night out?” One is a sleeveless, champagne-colored beaded gown. The other ensemble features a long-sleeved black and silver coat, sumptuously lined with red velvet and a fur collar.
An installation view of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
Interviewer Door Peephole, 1929, designed by Ben Bernard Breslow (1904–1972), manufacturer: Dorgril Manufacturing Company, New York, NY, from the collection of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
Across from the entry to the exhibition and cut from a wall perpendicular to the one against which the vanity stands, a curving window rhymes in shape with the mirror and provides a view of the next dimly lit gallery space. Painted in dark green, this gallery is a counter to the glowing, warm ambience of pink and gold hues in the boudoir. Here, a door peephole designed by Ben Bernard Breslow beckons visitors to the realm of the speakeasy.
An installation view of the bar area in the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
A view of the information guide in the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
In the speakeasy gallery, visitors can sit at a bar and browse a drink menu. The drink menu, like a women’s magazine available in the boudoir, is a cleverly disguised information guide about the objects on view. Behind the bar, wine glasses, coupes, and goblets line up neatly in a display case installed on the wall.
A view of the bar in the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
The bar itself is a vitrine. Ashtrays and cigarette holders cluster in designed disarray, as if in use. Contributing to this effect, the curator nestles cardboard reproductions of cigarette boxes in the cigarette holders. These facsimiles look like the cigarette boxes depicted in ads from the era, demonstrating the rigorous research involved in conceptualizing the show. Two separate seating areas further create the intimate atmosphere and spatial organization of a speakeasy.
A view of a seating area in the Vice section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
When I visited the exhibition, I spoke with Goodrum and Maya Wright, Director of Interpretation at the Kirkland Museum, about the processes and challenges of realizing the exhibition. They mentioned how the curatorial approach—that is, examining American Art Deco in a way that invited connection with a woman or that presented domestic and public life from a woman's perspective—was "radical" for the museum. Their goal was to be "political," to question the gendered presumptions surrounding who American society dubs vain. [1] Vanity, as it is ascribed to women, is a socially constructed double-bind in which women must fastidiously attend to their appearances; society then admonishes them as narcissistic.
A view of a side table and objects in the Vanity section of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
I got the sense that the larger institutional apparatus of the museum, as well as entrenched habits of supposedly neutral museum practice, curtailed more explicitly political framing in terms of intersections in social identities.
While interpretive materials in Vanity & Vice don’t directly state it, women of color invented rebellious practices and innovative aesthetics during the early twentieth century. These inventions signaled and ushered in “women’s new-found autonomy” and “rebellion” to borrow phrasing from the wall texts and promotional materials. For example, A’Lelia Walker created the space and conditions for artistic connection, throwing luxurious parties attended by luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance including Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Walker owned a Paul Frankl skyscraper bookcase—a piece of furniture in a series that includes the dressing cabinet in Vanity & Vice. [2]
An installation view of the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
Goodrum also mentioned the challenge of creating an exhibition about a period that plays a significant role in cultural imaginations. Many people, as Goodrum explained, have preconceived notions about Art Deco as a style and about related cultural phenomena. [3] Indeed, contemporary cultural representations of the flapper—that symbol of 1920s female rebellion—romanticize and overrepresent her as a young white woman. As scholar of African American history Saidiya Hartman puts it in a critique of the erasure of the flapper’s origins in Black radical social life, the romanticized, white flapper is a "pale imitation of the ghetto girl." [4] Notably, American society used and still uses charges of vanity and vice to police women, but especially Black women.
Lady with Hound Pendant Compact, c. 1925, manufactured by Ripley & Gowan Company, Attleboro, MA, acrylic and aluminum, from the collection of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
Mabel’s moniker was a discerning decision, one that Goodrum made by doing research in Social Security indexes from the years in which the character of Mabel would have been born. As Goodrum notes, Mabel was a popular name during the early 1900s. [5] Moreover, the choice to name the central character “Mabel” seems to acknowledge its popularity as a name for little girls from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds. [6]
An installation view of Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
One might think of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (b. 1896, d. 1966), a Chinese American suffragist who was herself prohibited from voting even after the passage of the 19th amendment—which secured the right to vote for women—because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited citizenship for Chinese immigrants. [7] Or perhaps civil rights activist Mabel Byrd (b. 1895, d. 1988) comes to mind. Byrd collaborated with W.E.B Du Bois and wrote for The Crisis, the official journal published by the NAACP. [8]
Wall texts invoke historical events such as the passage of the nineteenth amendment as context for the exhibition. But Vanity & Vice does not elaborate on women’s differential access to and creative practices of freedom depending on race, sexuality, or immigration status. In this way, the exhibition over-universalizes what it was like to live as women during the 1920s and ‘30s.
A view of the front entrance graphic in the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image by DARIA.
A graphic of two women facing each other appears at the entrance of the galleries. One figure is blocked out in a creamy white, the other silhouetted in a tawny hue. The two colors suggest the figures have different complexions. [9] This graphic, along with the choice to leave Mabel’s racial identity unspecified in interpretive materials, smartly opens the possibility for visitors to imagine her as a Black woman, or a Chinese American woman, or a woman who navigated life according to numerous other identifications and constructions of identity. But interpretive materials don’t help fill out these histories.
A view of the bar vitrine in the Vice section in Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum.
As Becca Goodrum and I finished our conversation at the entryway to the exhibition, a visitor approached Goodrum and expressed enthusiasm for the show. The visitor was excited to see the objects presented in a way that enlivened Art Deco material culture and that set objects into their contexts of use. And she expressed a desire to see more such curations at the museum. Vanity & Vice beautifully performs the very characteristics of Art Deco—its stylized forms and bold lines—in its interpretive restraint and savvy organization of physical space. Mabel, and her tour from the boudoir to the speakeasy, compellingly gestures towards how the Kirkland Museum might introduce other social issues and historical contexts into the museum’s object-focused curatorial program.
Nina Peterson (she/her) is a 2024-2025 Harold Leonard Memorial Fellow in Film Studies and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MA in art history and museum studies from the University of Denver. Currently based in Denver, she researches histories of photography, film, and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
[1] Conversation with Becca Goodrum and Maya Wright, on August 2, 2024, at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts, Denver, CO.
[2] Laura Walser, “How A'Lelia Walker And The Dark Tower Shaped The Harlem Renaissance,” National Trust for Historic Preservation, March 29, 2017, savingplaces.org/stories/how-alelia-walker-and-the-dark-tower-shaped-the-harlem-renaissance.
[3] Conversation with Becca Goodrum and Maya Wright, on August 2, 2024.
[4] Hartman uses her methodology of critical fabulation (a form of narrativizing history that counters archival omissions) to imagine Black women’s radical practices of creating joy and enacting freedom during the early twentieth century. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), xv.
[5] Conversation with Becca Goodrum and Maya Wright on August 2, 2024.
[6] Hartman notes that "Mabel" was a popular name for Black baby girls at the turn of the twentieth century, though this is in the context of describing her choice to leave some characters in her text nameless as a protective measure and a refusal of exploitative practices in historiography. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 14.
[7] Kerri Lee Alexander, “Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (1897-1966),” National Women’s History Museum, accessed August 28, 2024. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mabel-ping-hua-lee.
[8] Kayla Smith, “Mabel Byrd & W.E.B. Du Bois: A Story of Activism and Friendship,” Oregon Women’s Consortium, accessed August 28, 2024, oregonwomenshistory.org/mabel-byrd-w-e-b-du-bois-a-story-of-activism-and-friendship/.
[9] The depiction and description of skin tone in cosmetics ads during the 1920s and ‘30s was itself bound up in national and transnational formations of race. Cosmetics ads published in The Crisis were meant to counter racist ideas and structures. As the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group puts it in reference to these ads, “representations of the African American Modern Girl were often strategically deployed to contest Jim Crow racial hierarchies.” Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeline Y. Dong, Tani E. Barlow, “The Modern Girl Around the World: Cosmetics Advertising and the Politics of Race and Style,” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, ed. by Alys Eve Weinbaum et. al. (Duke University Press, 2008): 43.
