RESEARCH VISIT BY TWO FIU GRADUATE STUDENTS RESEARCHERS

This Thursday two Florida International University students taking the same Ethnohistorical Methods class but working on very different projects came to our rare books and special collections library to gather information and do some research. This course benefitted from a Mellon grant which allowed the professor to integrate museum objects and artifacts into the curriculum. One of the goals of the course is to train students to make use of primary source materials for their research projects, but also to encourage them to investigate how and why such archives and collections were amassed by conducting interviews (where possible) with the persons responsible for gathering the materials.

Charles Heck arrived at the library with an interest in social and environmental considerations in the development of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, as well as its notorious favelas. While our own collection trails off pretty quickly in the post-war period, we were able to direct the student to a large collection of architecture slides taken by one of the Wolfsonian’s former fellows, Eric Dluhosch. Professor Dluhosch, who retired a few years ago from teaching at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, traveled extensively across the globe and spent time in Brazil at architecture conferences that investigated various social housing experiments and documented the development of slums in that and other Latin American countries. His large collection of architectural slides was donated to Florida International University some years ago and is in the process of being digitized for use by the university’s School of Architecture. The student may have the opportunity to meet with and interview Dr. Dluhosch directly as he is escaping the snowiest and the coldest of the winter months down here in sunny Miami Beach. Of course, there were also items in our own collection that addressed some of the student’s research concerns as well including the brochure pictured above.

Later that afternoon, Professor Dennis Wiedman directed another of his students, Benjamin Augustyn, to our library to discover what materials might be available for researching his topic of colonial tourism. While the student had originally been focused on some of the colorful travel posters of the interwar period, (of which there are many in our museum), he soon learned that there was a wealth of related materials in other formats (brochures, advertisements, menus, postcards) available for direct consultation in our library, or else easily viewed on the internet via our web OPAC and virtual library displays: ( http://207.67.203.78/W10054 ; http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org ) As the Wolfsonian founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. happened to be in town, we were also able to set up an interview with the original collector of the materials. Here are a few samples of some of the colonial tourist trade materials to be found in our rare books library.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT? RIGHT YOU ARE!

It’s 4:00 PM in the afternoon this Saturday and it is the first opportunity I’ve had all day to sit down at my desk, get caught up with voice mails, emails, etc. At 10:00 AM twenty Miami-Dade County teachers enrolled in a Master’s program at Florida International University arrived for a lecture presentation on the Wolfsonian library’s holdings of New Deal era materials. Three lingered on after 1:00 PM for an opportunity to do some archival research in our library.

Even as I was in the process of clearing some of the rare Roosevelt era books and ephemera from the table, notification came that a group of twenty-three Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts would be coming up at 2:00 PM to see our library display, listen to an overview of the library collection, and to see whatever we had to offer regarding the work of the famous architect. They did not go away disappointed. The group was treated to a number of Frank Lloyd Wright related items, including: Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, a two-volume elephant portfolio of his work published by E. Wasmuth in Berlin in 1910, and which helped to establish his reputation internationally; an advertisement for The Jewel of the Orient: The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, his most famous building in that country; a special edition of the Dutch graphic design magazine Wendingen devoted exclusively to Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and featuring a special cover design mimicking the architect’s style; the Annual of American design, 1931 featuring Frank Lloyd Wrights’ article, “Principles of design”; the July 1937 issue of Town & Country featuring his Falling Water masterpiece on the front cover; and Amerikka rakentaa, a Finnish work celebrating Wright’s architectural genius in 1945.

Here are a couple of images from the rare brochure advertising his famous hotel built in the Maya Revival style and completed in 1923 before the Great Earthquake struck the city that same year. The edifice survived relatively unscathed considering the devastation unleashed by the 8.3 magnitude quake, but in 1968 much of the façade was dismantled and carted away, and the building itself demolished to make way for a new hotel on the same spot. The images from this brochure were taken soon after its opening.

AFTER HOURS VISIT BY FIU HISTORICAL METHODS CLASS

Last evening, Dr. Aurora G. Morcillo brought the graduate students in her Historical Methods class to our rare books and special collections library for a presentation by Mellon grant coordinator Jon Mogul and yours truly. The aim was to expose the students to some of the nonliterary primary source materials in our library and to help them learn how to “read” and make sense of the visual imagery and physicality of the artifacts. It is hoped that after their visit the students might began thinking about utilizing such materials not merely as illustrations, but as evidence as compelling and potentially revealing as anything offered in some of the more traditional literary sources. The library table in our main reading room was laid out in advance of their arrival with an array of diverse materials covering five areas of strength from our collection: World’s Fair catalogs and ephemera; a wide variety of items documenting various colonial projects of the late nineteenth and twentieth century; all manner of propaganda produced in the Soviet Union; Spanish Civil War leaflets and vintage postcards; and a variety of rare books, calendars, and portfolios illustrated by American Socialist and Communist artists in the 1930s.

Starting with the VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) methodology, the students were asked to look at and describe exactly what they saw in the artifacts until the group collectively exhausted the imagery of the items. In order to interpret and make sense of the objects, the students were next asked to think about these same designed objects in the historical, social, and cultural context of the times in which they were made. They were encouraged to think about who produced the work and for what intent? Who was the intended audience? Was there a subtext or subliminal message buried in the text or image that the historical audience might have immediately or subconsciously recognized? How was the message meant to be distributed? Was there some relationship between the design of the object (photograph, photomontage, linocut, illustration, and caricature), its form (exhibition catalog, postcard, leaflet, and handbill) and the ideology its creators espoused?

I have included one item from each of the five categories mentioned above so that my readers might also have a chance to try their hand at parsing and interpreting the items for themselves. Feel free to comment with your own impressions and interpretations of these historical artifacts.

A VIRTUAL VERSION OF ALPHABET SOUP !

FIU STUDENT-CURATED EXHIBIT NOW ONLINE

Thanks to the efforts of Digital Library Specialist David Almeida, a Florida International University student show exhibited in the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique campus in the winter months of 2009/2010 can now be viewed online. Seven undergraduate students studying the Great Depression and New Deal Era researched and selected materials from the Wolfsonian-FIU library and from the Mitchell Wolfson Study Collection in downtown Miami. They displayed those items in an exhibition about the New Deal programs of the Roosevelt Administration. Now that show lives on in a virtual display format which can be viewed by anyone using the internet anywhere around the globe.

The display is arranged according to the themes chosen, researched, and curated by the students. Mariana Clavijo covered President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s earliest New Deal programs: the NRA (National Recovery Administration) and AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration). Maria Aliano and Miriam Kashem gathered artifacts from our own rare books library as well as items in Mr. Wolfson’s private collection to examine how the New Deal aimed at solving the issues of problem youth during the Great Depression. Ms. Aliano honed in on the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) while Ms. Kashem also explored government-produced pamphlets from the WPA (Work Projects Administration) and NYA (National Youth Administration) aimed at showing how the government was taking care of its younger citizens. Jessica Tejeiro chose items related to the FAP (Federal Arts Project), focusing on federally-funded galleries and community art centers while Kevin Pineiro looked at Federal One projects including: the FTP (Federal Theatre Project), FMP (Federal Music Project), and the FWP (Federal Writers’ Project). Michelle Zavala and Christie Vina teamed up to explore the FWP (Federal Writers’ Project), looking at the American Guide Series of books published to promote travel and tourism to all 48 states and territories of the United States.

VISIT BY MIAMI SHORES BAPTIST ACADEMY STUDENTS

This morning we entertained twenty-three third to fifth graders and their teachers and monitors from the Miami Shores Baptist Academy in a library tour arranged by Claudia Caro Sullivan in our education department. The young students had come to the library for a presentation of the book as art object. The tables in the main library reading room were laid out with a variety of beautiful books ranging from oversized leather editions richly decorated in the art nouveau style complete with gold tooling; batik cloth bindings; upholstery and fabric sample books and decorative arts catalogs with a papier-mâché contoured cover stored in a silk cloth covered box; a batik vellum elephant portfolio holding one hundred year-old, poster-sized Rembrandt lithographic reproductions and another oversized portfolio containing pochoir illustrations of a Navajo War Ceremonial; and a unique binding made of bass and mother of pearl with hand-painted vellum pages done in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript.

As delighted as the students and their escorts were with the beautiful books on the table, the real surprise was reserved for me, however, when I picked up a Dutch language children’s book on Snow White. As I began hesitantly to trip my tongue over the Dutch title, Sneeuwwitje, one of the precocious young girls in the group intervened, confidently pronouncing it with flawless ease and precision. Evidently her parents had moved to South Florida a number of years ago, and she had been raised bilingually. Here are some images from the work in question:

VISIT BY FIU STUDENTS STUDYING THE HOLOCAUST

This Tuesday, the Wolfsonian library hosted the first of two scheduled visits by Professor Oren B. Stier and the students taking his Holocaust class on FIU’s Biscayne Bay campus. Oren Stier earned his PhD. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and serves as the graduate program director in the department of Religious Studies and the director of the Judaic Studies Program at Florida International University. Oren was a recipient of a Mellon infusion grant that allowed him to spend some time before the start of this current semester visiting the Wolfsonian. Working with Mellon grant coordinator, Jon Mogul and the library staff, Professor Stier preselected visual arts objects suited towards exposing his students to the Third Reich’s propaganda campaign that preceded and paved the way in Germany and the occupied territories for the mass deportations of Jews to the Nazi death camps. The students will be picking a museum object or library artifact and writing a five hundred word essay analyzing the visual message, historical context, etc. The second half of Professor Stier’s class will be coming to do the same this coming Friday. Here are a few of the items that the class had the chance to see.

Lest we conclude that the National Socialists' hateful anti-semitic propaganda campaign went unchallenged, I've decided to include in this blog a couple of images designed by Arthur Szyk, a Jewish artist born in Łódź, Poland in 1894. In 1936, Szyk completed his Hagaddah, but was unable to find a publisher in Poland owing to some of the blatantly anti-Nazi images included in the work. The following year, Szyk moved to England, publishing the latter work—sans the anti-Nazi references. In December, 1940, he again relocated, this time to New York City where he continued to produce anti-Nazi propaganda. Inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech in 1941, Szyk created an illustrated version of the same well before Norman Rockwell published his own iconic version. The same year, he published The New Order, a book of anti-Nazi caricatures, and in 1943 Szyk illustrated the cover of another booklet championing his people’s cause.