amy ruhl

A beloved children’s author, L. Frank Baum was also an avid participant in Gilded Age Capitalism, as a salesman and theorist of visual merchandising — his treatise on store window decoration,  “The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors,” (1900) is central to the project’s thematic and conceptual underpinnings. Baum’s journalism repeatedly endorsed westward expansion via the genocide of Indigenous peoples, seemingly supported (white) women’s suffrage while harshly parodying the Suffragette movement in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1908). Between Tin Men considers this ugly reality in relation to authorial ownership and fan labor, and concedes that the books' most revolutionary potential is actually not within the texts themselves, but rather Baum’s nonproprietary relationship to authorship.