Lecture by Grace Kuipers ’14: "Latent Value: Spratling Silver and the Aesthetics of Mineral Development"

Monday, April 6, 2026 at 4:30pm
Boger Hall, Room 112, 41 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut

Free and open to the public.

What can the U.S. pursuit of foreign minerals tell us about modernist design practices? This talk by Grace Kuipers ’14, an art historian and postdoctoral fellow based at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, examines the U.S. designer William Spratling’s silver jewelry workshop in Taxco, Mexico to explore the ways developmentalist approaches to mineral extraction shaped the aesthetic and cultural expressions of modernist primitivism in the 1930s. Crafted from high-grade Mexican silver and adapted from Pre-Columbian motifs, Spratling’s jewelry was celebrated as a modernist revival of Indigenous design traditions. Yet the workshop was also framed as an economic revival, credited with resurrecting Taxco’s colonial-era mines and reactivating the region’s dormant mineral resources. As an early project of cultural diplomacy, Spratling’s enterprise enacted a politics of mineral developmentalism, in which U.S. standards of technological modernity promised to more efficiently measure, manage, and extract Mexico’s subterranean natural resources. Ultimately, this talk considers how mineral developmentalism shaped the visual dimensions of Spratling Silver: from the spectacles of Indigenous labor that produced it, to the silver materiality of the jewelry itself, and finally the aesthetic vocabulary of Spratling’s primitivist design process, which staged the conversion of “latent” formal values into abstract stores of value that could be possessed or exchanged.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome. We encourage you to RSVP to help us with our planning and to get a reminder the day before this event. While RSVPs are not required for entry, they are a big help! While you're on campus, feel free to talk with our gallery assistants about the exhibitions and other upcoming special programs, like our student-led tours.

Image: William Spratling, Snake Pin, c. 1932.