MORE HOLIDAY CHEER FROM THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

LIBRARY OBJECT(S) OF THE WEEK

Have a happy Christmas holiday with these beautiful postcards illustrated by Lajos Kozma (1884-1948). Blog you next year!

DONATION OF RARE HUGO GELLERT PORTFOLIO TO THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY

We are delighted to be able to recognize the donation of an extraordinarily rare oversized portfolio to the Wolfsonian library collection by Elinor Brecher of Miami, Florida. Entitled, Century of the Common Man: two speeches by Henry A. Wallace, this portfolio contains double-page plates with excerpts of Vice President Henry Wallace’s speech and full-page silk-screened illustrations on the facing pages drawn by artist/activist Hugo Gellert (American, born in Hungary, 1892-1985). The portfolio was published in a limited edition of fifty-four, numbered and autographed by the artist. Hugo Gellert was an unabashedly outspoken member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and he lent all of his artist talents to championing that political cause.

This particular portfolio was published during the brief period of cordial U.S.-Soviet relations following the German invasion of Russia during the Second World War. After the invasion, Stalin deemed it expedient to seek the support of any and all left-leaning, liberal and "Popular Front" groups arrayed against the fascists. This latest donation joins two other oversized portfolios illustrated with lithographs by Gellert: Karl Marx Capital in Pictures and Comrade Gulliver: an Illustrated Account of Travel into that Strange Country the United States of America. These poster-sized portfolios comprise three of some thirty-four Gellert titles in our library. Several of his works were exhibited in a display organized by two Florida International University students last fall, and can be seen on line in a virtual display of their exhibition presently on view on the second floor of the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique Campus or accessible at the following web address:

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Great%20Depression/GD%20displays.htm

Our thanks go out to Elinor Brecher for her generosity in donating this wonderful portfolio. As a repository with a wide range of Gellert materials in our collection, we hope to be able to organize an exhibition sometime in the future that will make these materials presently available to visiting scholars in our library, accessible to the general public visiting our galleries as well.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

LIBRARY OBJECT(S) OF THE WEEK

In celebration of the Christmas holiday, I thought I’d share with you a few vintage postcard images from the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. These two anti-fascist postcards were published by the Secours Populaire de France in Paris with the aim of showing solidarity with the Spanish Republic. This group raised money and collected gifts to be sent at Christmas time to boost the morale of the children of Spain suffering the hardships of war.

XB1991.1170 ; XB1991.1171

RECEPTION FOR FIU STUDENT-CURATED EXHIBIT IN GREEN LIBRARY

Last evening, the student curators of a New Deal exhibit installed on the second floor of the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique campus were treated to a reception hosted by FIU Dean of Libraries Laura Probst and head of Special Collections Vicki Silvera. There the students had the opportunity to speak with Steve Sauls, Wolfsonian museum founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., museum director Cathy Leff and other library, history, architecture, and Honor’s College faculty and students in attendance about their curatorial experience and their displays. All of the items in the exhibits were selected by students taking my Great Depression and New Deal Era in Film and History class this fall semester, and utilized rare books and ephemera from the Wolfsonian-FIU library as well as items on loan from the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Private Collection in Miami.

At the close of the reception, the student curators were presented with tee shirts from the museum gift shop and copies of the poster for the exhibit created by the Wolfsonian’s own art director, Tim Hossler.

The eleven display cases filled by these students were supplemented by a virtual display of the exhibits created by the previous year’s class which were shown on a continuous loop on a large flat-screen monitor in the same section. Two of the student curators of that exhibit, Al Pena and Robert Gueits, were also on hand to discuss their displays dealing with the radical response of Leftist critics of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the experiences of African Americans enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

My special thanks to Laura Probst and Vicki Silvera for their support in providing the display space for this exhibition and for putting this reception together and providing refreshments. We look forward to working together with Vicki in planning some new collaborative exhibition projects.

COLLECTIONS CARE AND PREVENTIVE CONSERVATION ASSESSMENT

This Wednesday, the Wolfsonian-FIU Library closed to the public so that rare books cataloguer Dr. Harsanyi and I could join other museum staff in attending an all-day, in-house session with two conservators visiting from the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. The visit, funded by an IMLS grant, allowed the Wolfsonian to bring Leslie Paisley, Senior Conservator for Works on Paper and Adam Nesbit, Assistant Objects Conservator down from the frigid temperatures and snowstorms of New England to South Beach to help us assess and address our present and future conservation needs. They have spent much of their visit this week walking through the museum facilities and storage spaces, and interviewing senior staff about museum environmental concerns, conservation and stabilization policies and practices, and other issues relating to the care, handling, and storage of rare and fragile materials in the collection. Yesterday’s meeting provided museum staff with a bibliography of printed and online conservation resources; samples of materials useful for archival storage; and many useful suggestions for handling, re-housing, and storing rare materials so as to minimize risk of damage and to prolong their life as objects of study.

Although the library does not presently have the trained staff or resources to undertake aggressive conservation treatments of some of the fragile and brittle works in the collection, we have been actively moving forward with a collection stabilization program. Given our location in the subtropics, donations and new acquisitions are screened for evidence of bookworm and silverfish activity. Suspect items are isolated and frozen in a special low-temp freezer at our off-site annex to prevent the possible transfer of insect infestations to the library. Library interns and volunteers have also been trained to create archival-quality, custom-fit Melinex sleeves for the delicate ephemera in the library collection using an ultrasonic polyester encapsulation machine put together on the premises by inventor William Minter a couple of years ago. This rather expensive machine—(partially funded by a generous Capital Development grant from Miami Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs)--has allowed us to produce inexpensive enclosures that provide brittle items with added tensile strength and protect them from the oils naturally found on our fingers. We have also recently ordered archival drop front storage boxes in order to re-house and better preserve the thousands of cruise ship industry promotional materials recently added to our collection by the donation of Dr. Laurence Miller.

It is our hope that the conservation assessment made by Leslie and Adam will provide the museum staff with a better sense of what we are doing right, and in what directions we need to go to continue to preserve this important patrimony of the state of Florida.

THEY DID NOT DIE!

TWO SCHOLARS VISIT TO REVIEW OUR RARE SCOTTSBORO BOYS MATERIALS

After a late night Art Basel event in which 192 visitors flooded into the library for a look at some of highlights from our collection of rare books, it was a relief to have only a single appointment with two visiting scholars to contend with this Saturday morning. James Arthur Miller, professor of English and American Studies at the George Washington University, and Susan Dabney Pennybacker, Professor of European History at Trinity College came to the library with an interest in seeing materials related to the infamous Scottsboro trial. Nine African American youths riding the rails in search of work during the Great Depression were pulled from the train in Scottsboro and unjustly accused of raping two white girls also discovered on the train. Narrowly escaping a lynching, the youths were tried and condemned to death by an all-white jury in a sham court trial. Eager to expose Southern racism, Capitalist labor exploitation, and to recruit new party members among African Americans, the legal branch of the Communist Party of the United States of America, (the ILD, or International Labor Defense), took on their case and demanded a retrial. As the resultant court cases and appeals dragged on for several years, the Party organized an international propaganda campaign and demonstrations across the globe in support of the “Scottsboro Boys.” Both of the visiting scholars have written important monographs on the subject published by the Princeton University Press in paperback: Professor Miller’s work is entitled Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial, and Professor Pennybacker’s history, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain.

Among the Scottsboro-related materials in our own collection is one particularly rare and possibly unique item of interest: a mock-up for a linoleum block book designed by Lin Shi Khan for the Communist Party, but which was apparently never published at the time. Our block book has original notes for captions scrawled on the pages opposite the linocut illustrations, with some editorial comments and corrections. (A later version of the block book prototype was later discovered among the personal papers of the Communist journalist and editor of the New Masses, Joseph North with abbreviated lino-cut captions, and some omitted and some added plates, which was reprinted in 2002 by the New York University Press). Our own copy can be seen in its entirety online at the following web address: http://www.wolfsonian.org/collections/c9/index.html

The scholars were also thrilled to see our extensive holdings of the work of Hugo Gellert, and a portfolio of his work recently donated to the collection—but more about that in another blog.

VISIT BY HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN CLASS

This morning the Wolfsonian-FIU Library hosted a visit by Rosanne Gibel and a couple of students enrolled in her History of Graphic Design class at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale. Ms. Gibel and her students were treated to a guided tour through our public galleries and were given a privileged “sneak peek” at some of the artwork gracing the floors and walls of our administrative office spaces. Once in the library, the class had the opportunity to view close hand some rare exemplary graphic design materials from the late Victorian period, and examples of Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, Art Deco, Futurism, Vorticism, Constructivism, and other important artistic movements. Some highlights of the survey included: materials drawn from our collection of the work of Bill Bradley (1868-1962). Bradley, who was deeply influenced by British Arts & Crafts movement, was dubbed the “American Beardsley” and reputedly was the first American to dabble in the Art Nouveau style.

The students were also exposed to the work of Peter Behrens (1868-1940), a founding member of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in Germany and early advocate of design reform. On account of his pioneering work designing the entire corporate identity of AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gessellschaft), he is generally considered to be the world’s first industrial designer.

After viewing some Futurist and Constructivist masterpieces by Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) and El Lissitsky (1891-1941), the class ended their tour with an examination of some advertising designs from an archive of Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). Bayer, a student of the Weimar Bauhaus, became a prominent graphic designer in Berlin, and, after moving to the United States in 1938, organized the “Bauhaus 1919-1928” exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art and an important exponent of the New Bauhaus school in America.

ALPHABET SOUP STUDENT EXHIBIT INSTALLED IN FIU'S GREEN LIBRARY

After months of scheduling research visits, picking topics, selecting items, and writing interpretive and descriptive labels, seven Florida International University students studying the Great Depression and New Deal Era installed their exhibit in the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique campus. Unwrapping the carefully-selected materials and installing them and their labels in the cases on the second floor of the library took several hours. The last items were placed in the cases just as their fellow students arrived for the guided tours and a question and answer session.

One of the students, Mariana Clavijo, selected materials from two of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s earliest New Deal programs: the NRA and AAA. (It goes without saying that Ms. Clavijo was not interested in either the National Rifle Association or the American Automobile Association). Rather, she used her display to investigate how the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration promoted their plans, and to determine if the reforms actually succeeded in providing real relief to industrial and farm workers hit hard by the Great Depression.

Several of the student curators decided to focus on the Federal Arts Project (FAP, or Federal One). Jessica Tejeiro, for example, chose to display exhibition catalogs and programs for works of art exhibited in federally-funded community art centers and galleries. She also tapped into an archive of official documents and correspondence of Robert Delson, head of the Florida Arts Project in Jacksonville, and illustrator of the Florida Guide.

Speaking of the American Guide Series, Michelle Zavala and Christie Vina worked as a team to hone in on the Federal Writers’ Project, or FWP. Together they filled two cases with some of the books written to encourage domestic tourism by publishing histories and travel guides to the 48 existing states of the Union.

Kevin Pineiro also selected items from the Wolfsonian-FIU library collection for the Federal Arts Project, choosing items that more generally documented New Deal Art, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Writers’ Project.

Two more student curators, Maria Aliano and Miriam Kashem, decided to focus in on those New Deal programs aimed at the young. Ms. Aliano looked at the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) choosing items from the Wolfsonian library and borrowing a few rare pamphlets, photographs, annuals, and even a woodblock and a print made by an aspiring CCC artist, Friedolin Edward Kessler (American, 1919–1995). Although Ms. Kashem also picked objects about Roosevelt’s so-called “Tree Army,” she also selected items from WPA (Work Projects Administration) and NYA (National Youth Administration) programs. The WPA funded projects aimed at nursing malnourished children back to health while the NYA provided unemployed youths with educational opportunities and vocational training to turn potential delinquents into upstanding and productive citizens.

A Powerpoint presentation will also be running on the large flat screen monitor in the exhibit area featuring the displays put together by FIU students who opted to do this curatorial project Fall semester 2008. Although this year’s installation came off without a hitch, there was some unexpected excitement during the student-guided tours that followed. Just as Ms. Kashem was pointing out a board game and talking about the forest fire prevention and suppression activities of the CCC, the Green Library’s fire alarms went off! Fortunately, after a fifteen-minute “recess,” the class reassembled and the tour resumed.

We hope to be able to organize a public reception where the the student curators will again have the opportunity to give guided tours and speak about their curatorial experience with Wolfsonian museum founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. in attendance. This event is likely to take place sometime in the late afternoon or early evening, Thursday December 10th. Details to follow!

FIU ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS TO CONTEMPLATE A POSTCARD MUSEUM

This Tuesday we had a visit in the library by Claudia Busch, Eric Peterson, and Michelle Cintron from the School of Architecture at Florida International University. Professor Busch and her colleagues will be teaching a class for second year architecture students this coming Spring semester. Students taking this class will be designing plans for a small museum dedicated exclusively to the postcard. With well over 11,000 postcards in our library collection, the professors visited our library to determine some of the important environmental, security, storage, lighting, presentation, visitation, and exhibition concepts that their students ought to be considering in their plans. Some of the topics discussed at the meeting included the types of shelving and storage best suited to housing and facilitating retrieval of such a collection; whether this museum would need to accommodate visits by the general public and large groups of school children; and whether there ought to be a separate section or area with study carrels or offices for visiting researchers or residential scholars. Other considerations brought up by Wolfsonian curator Sarah Schleuning included ideas related to optimal viewing, weighing in on the pluses and minuses of natural and artificial lighting treatments. And, of course, when contemplating a site on South Beach, what ought student architects be thinking in terms of protecting the collection from undue light exposure, flooding, and tropical rain and windstorms.

While we have not yet ever mounted an exhibition devoted solely to the postcard, we do regularly integrate them into our public galleries and especially in our own library displays. Because of their relatively small and standard shapes, postcard exhibitions pose some particularly difficult problems for display. To avoid monotonous exhibits, a postcard museum might want to make use of narrow gallery spaces where the items do not get lost. Alternatively, the student architects might want to take advantage of the new technologies of digital capture and projection to create environments where the postcards could be presented to the public virtually in any variety of scales and sizes. Whatever choices these students ultimately make, we can be sure that a visit to the Wolfsonian’s facility and collection will serve to inspire them with the postcards' possibilities. Here are just a few of the postcards that these professors had a chance to see.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS! NEW AND PENDING ARRIVALS!

It’s late Saturday afternoon and I’m just getting to my second blog for the week. It’s not that nothing of note has been happening in the library. Quite the contrary! Rare books cataloguer Dr. Nicolae Harsanyi is away on vacation, digital library specialist David Almeida is expecting a new addition to the family any day now, and we’re still juggling visits by VIPs, swarms of Miami Dade Public School children, and a flurry of FIU students doing last minute research during the “end of the semester crunch.” Even the students taking my Great Depression and New Deal Era in Film and History class have been booking appointments all week long in order to complete their curatorial displays. Their projects are to be exhibited at the Green Library this coming Tuesday—but more on this in another blog!

But I would be remiss if I didn’t take enough of a breather to acknowledge the generosity of one of the Wolfsonian-FIU’s long-time supporters and board members, Frederic Sharf, and his wife, Jean. Just a few short weeks ago, several very large boxes filled with a veritable treasure-trove of gifts arrived in the museum's loading dock. Among the numerous color chromolithographic prints, paintings, and other materials slated for the museum collection were more than fifty exceedingly rare books. The view books graphically document the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the rising naval power of the United States; the Philippine American War, 1899-1902; the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905; and the Japanese conflicts in Manchuria, China—most of the latter from the Japanese perspective. The donation of the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection fills a void in our own collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century military and colonial propaganda and materials documenting Japan's rising empire in the Far East. We are very grateful to Fred and Jean for this powerful demonstration of their faith in the future of this institution, and for their continued generosity and support. While we have just begun the process of cataloging and creating digital images of the donation, a few more highlights from the library portion of this new collection may be viewed on our gift acknowledgement webpage: http://www.librarygifts.wolfsonian.org/

VISIT BY HIALEAH GARDENS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Since 1995, the Wolfsonian-FIU has been working with the Miami-Dade public school system on a collaborative project entitled: Page at a Time. Developed by the Wolfsonian’s education staff, this interdisciplinary program has provided language arts, social studies, and visual arts school teachers with a methodology designed to help their fifth and sixth grade students learn how to be more critical and discerning consumers of the visual images and messages with which they are increasingly bombarded. The students themselves come to the museum for three visits, participating in tours and workshops designed to inspire their own book-making projects. Working with their teachers, each student contributes one page of text and images to a book that is collectively created and bound by the class as a whole. The projects invariably revolve around the twin themes of “conflict and resolution,” but the teachers and students are free to decide whether they wish to focus on social, ecological, technological, military, political, or personal topics.

Today, this project included for the first time a visit by high school students who will serve as mentors for this year’s round of fifth graders. Twenty-three Hialeah Gardens High School students came to the library for an hour and a half presentation covering the history of the book, and an up-close look at some rare and unusual bindings in our collection, including: a Japanese scroll book and accordian-style book, an elephant portfolio of lithographs by Rembrandt, a papier-mâché contoured binding by the Wiener Werkstatte, several Futurist and Constructivist masterpieces, and some quirky sales catalogs and cookbooks. They also had the opportunity to look at some of the collaborative book projects produced by students participating in the program in years past.

Pictured above are a few of the unusual bindings they had the opportunity to review.

WOLFSONIAN PROFILE: LIBRARY VOLUNTEER, ARMANDO SUAREZ

Today I would like to feature one of several persons working in the Wolfsonian-FIU library in a volunteer capacity. With a full-time staff of two librarians and one digital library specialist, we are extremely dependent on student interns and volunteers to meet the reference needs of our many student and faculty visitors and to keep up with our daily work regime of preserving and making accessible to the public our vast library holdings. Fortunately, we have had a number of dedicated individuals willing to donate their time in return for some practical training and experience in special collections librarianship.

One such individual is Armando Suarez. A native of Madrid, Spain, Mr. Suarez has been working full-time for the Wolfsonian as a financial and administrative assistant since November 2007. Those duties have not deterred him from coming in on his free days to work with us here in our rare books and special collections library. Armando has provided us with invaluable assistance in processing and accessioning several recently-acquired collections, cataloging the same in MARC21, making Melinex enclosures for rare and delicate items using our ultrasonic polyester welding machine, and creating digital images of our ephemeral items and linking those images to the catalog records in our OPAC.

Armando has also been able to work directly alongside Dr. Laurence Miller, retired director of libraries at FIU and donor of a large collection of post-war materials promoting the cruise line industry. That collaboration has provided Mr. Suarez with a rare opportunity for knowledge acquisition and expertise in the field. “It has been a particularly wonderful experience to work hands-on with the donor of a large and varied collection,” says Suarez, and “particularly significant on a personal level, as it has awakened my interest in furthering my education in the field of library science.” Based on his dedication and outstanding performance here, we know that when he does leave us it will be to begin walking down the path to a fine career in the field.

SOME THOUGHTS FOR THE VETERANS DAY HOLIDAY

In commemoration of the Veterans Day holiday, I thought I would put down a few thoughts regarding the treatment of those men (and women) that have served, fought, suffered, and often died for this country since its inception in 1776. The holiday grew out of President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation of Armistice Day, November 11, 1919 at the end of the First World War; a Congressional resolution in 1926 calling for appropriate ceremonies; and final approval in 1938 of a legal holiday “dedicated to the cause of world peace.” In 1954, Armistice Day was changed to Veterans Day to include honoring the services of veterans of all the war fought by the soldiers of the United States.

But the treatment of America’s veterans has a far longer and tumultuous tradition than the history of the holiday might imply. In fact, one of the very first rebellions faced by the newly-formed American Republic, (Shays Rebellion), took its name from the former Revolutionary war veteran who led a band of discontented veterans to demand a redress of their grievances. Many revolutionary war soldiers had been conscripted, fought without pay, and had been shabbily-treated upon discharge, including being locked up in debtor’s prison. In response to high taxes, confiscations, and foreclosures of their family farms, more than a thousand former soldiers banded together in 1786-1787, occupying county courthouses in Western Massachusetts to forestall property seizures. When their petitions to the Massachusetts governor were ignored and their leaders threatened with “treason,” the veterans attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Springfield, but were routed with some casualties, and their militia soon after disbanded and their leaders slipped away or were arrested.

Sadly, World War I veterans, for whom the holiday originated, were not so better treated in the height of the Great Depression. When in 1932 a bill was introduced into Congress that would have provided immediate (and desperately-needed) compensation to veterans for lost wages during their time of service, some veterans organized a Bonus Expeditionary force to march on Washington and put pressure on Congress to pass the bill. Ultimately, 43,000 desperate veterans and their families converged on the capital, setting up a large “shantytown” on the Anacostia flats on the city’s outskirts. While the bill passed the House, it was killed by the Senate, and President Hoover authorized the army under General MacArthur to drive the lingering protesters out with tanks, teargas, and bayonet point. The burning of the camps by the army did not help Hoover’s re-election campaign!

These last two images come from two recent donations to the Wolfsonian-FIU library. The first is an illustration of a disabled WWI veteran reduced to selling pencils and begging for aid. It was designed as Communist Party propaganda by Hugo Gellert during the Great Depression. The second is the dust jacket of a book documenting the “Bonus March” and its unhappy ending.

On a brighter note, in 1944 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (popularly known as the G.I. Bill) into law, guaranteeing veterans assistance in returning to civilian life. The law provided for vocational training or college education, unemployment compensation, and even federal-subsidized loans for home mortgages or starting up new businesses.