PROVIDENCE – A collection of vintage fruit-crate labels is on display at the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University through May 2009 in an exhibit that mixes the art of the labels and the history of fruit growers.
“Dripping with Color: The Art of the Fruit Crate Label” displays unused labels that date from the 1870s to the 1950s, an era when the labels were a marketing tool to differentiate growers’ products from competitors because they were packed in identical crates.
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New York University art professor and sculptor Marilynn Gelfman Karp and her husband, art dealer Ivan C. Karp, donated 238 fruit-crate labels for the exhibit, which also puts the labels into historical context with information on the growers, the lithographers and the crate designs. Some of the equipment used to pick fruit in the fields will also be on display.
In his research Richard J.S. Gutman, Culinary Arts Museum director and curator, said he discovered that his grandfather built fruit crates and “shooks” – a box that collapsed for return shipping – for the Clover Leaf Box Co. in New Jersey, after he emigrated from the Ukraine in 1900. •
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