Welcome to Mina Loy’s virtual storefront.

This marketplace aims to situate Loy’s created and invented objects all in one place. By placing these objects together in an online store, we wish to not only illustrate the range of Loy’s inventions, but also underscore that these products were once for sale. By reading the product descriptions and placing these items in your cart, we hope to emphasize that Loy was as much a business woman as she was an artist. Not only is placing objects in your cart an exercise in commerce, it is also an act of recovery; unfortunately many of Mina Loy’s lampshades and her objects no longer exist. By creating a virtual marketplace, we wish to preserve Loy’s legacy as an entrepreneur in a way that her brick and mortar storefront could not. The e-marketplace also attempts to recreate the pleasure of shopping, which is typically denigrated as feminine and exiled from the realm of scholarship.

Pricing is based on converting the 1926 French Franc to the 2018 U.S. Dollar (1 franc= $0.68 USD). We have priced the items using either historical record, or estimated cost (particularly for the designs never made and sold). 

Images gathered here are drawn from the following collections:

• Mina Loy Papers. Beinecke Digital Collections. YCAL_MSS_6. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 
• Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

To view your cart, return to the e-Marketplace homepage and your products will appear below. Although you can’t actually purchase the products, you can enjoy browsing and provide your own reviews based on your imaginary possession of the objects.