Demitasse spoon:Manufactures & Liberal Arts

Organizers of the world's great international exhibitions viewed the events as educational opportunities and used souvenirs as a way of emphasizing the fairs' key points. This silver-plated demitasse spoon from the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, highlights the fair's emphasis on technology as the key to cultural progress. Decorated with seemingly incongruous images of a Native American in full headdress, Niagara Falls, and the Machinery & Transportation Building, with the fair's signature Electric Tower on the back, the spoon combines the fair's basic themes. While the Spanish-influenced architecture of the Machinery & Transportation Building suggests the exposition's ostensible purpose in promoting trade with Latin America, the exhibits housed in it clearly emphasized American invention and ingenuity in displays of everything from bicycles and automobile manufacturing to the latest locomotives and steam engines. Native Americans-by then already forcibly relocated onto reservations in the West-appeared on display as "barbarians," while Niagara Falls symbolized the great force of nature harnessed to produce the electricity that powered the fully illuminated Electric Tower.