POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

IMAGINING A DAY WHEN THE WOLFSONIAN MIGHT EXPAND ITS WASHINGTON AVENUE BLUEPRINT TO THE SIDE, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY CREATE DESIGNS FOR A POSTCARD MUSEUM

This Wednesday, Wolfsonian Special Projects Co-ordinator Regina Bailey and I drove out to the Paul L Cejas School of Architecture building on the Modesto Maidique Campus of Florida International University. We had been invited by Claudia Busch to sit in on Design 4, a professional and peer review session where those students were making their final presentations for designs for a postcard museum to occupy the site adjacent to the Wolfsonian. The students and their professors had come to the Wolfsonian library some months earlier with the aim of learning about the special needs and requirements of an institution dedicated exclusively to the preservation, study, and exhibition of the postcard. (See my blog dated Friday, January 8, 2010).

On that occasion, the students had the opportunity to chat with curator Sarah Schleuning, exhibition designer Richard Miltner, and the library staff to hear about the special challenges posed by storing and presenting small ephemeral items such as postcards to the public in a novel and exciting manner. Some of the ideas that had floated around at that time ranged from the digital projection of postcard images in galleries and public spaces; the possibility of creating narrow galleries in which small format postcards would not get lost; creating storage facilities to protect the fragile paper items from windstorm and water damage in a hurricane flood zone; and the pros and cons of employing natural and artificial light down here in sunny South Florida.

Regina and I were eager to see the projects that the students had come up with for meeting these challenges. Professors Eric Peterson, Elite Kedan, and Erik Sundquist had converted eight classrooms on three floors of the School of Architecture building into studios for the review session. Although we did not have the chance to listen to each and every one of the student presentations, we did have the privilege of listening in on the critiques provided by Jon Stuart, David Rifkind, and other reviewers, and to enter all eight studios to view the design drawings and three dimensional models created by the students. Here is just a small sampling of what we saw.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ONE OF OUR OWN!

I could not be more pleased to be able to announce that our own Digital Library Specialist, David Almeida was one of ten finalists selected out of 2,100 international artists applying for the West Prize, originally launched in 2008 with the aim of discovering new artists. David is largely responsible for digitizing the library collection, training and overseeing the scanning work of interns, and for creating our virtual library displays and donor acknowledgement web pages.

www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org ; www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org

David’s latest work plays on the scientific tradition of depicting plant and animal specimens by focusing his attention and camera lens not on real creatures but rather on their plastic representations which have become a ubiquitous part of our consumer society. As a finalist, David stands to receive $10,000 and his work will be added to the West Collection. Additionally, his artwork will be featured in a catalog documenting the work of all ten 2010 winners. The catalogue will be available at the time the exhibition with the same name, “10”, opens this spring at the SEI Gallery in Oaks, Pennsylvania. All of us at the Wolfsonian are extraordinarily proud of his artistic accomplishments and the recognition he has earned for his work.

VISIT BY FIU ARCHITECTURE FACULTY AND STUDENTS

Earlier this week, thirty-three students from Florida International University’s School of Architecture came to the Wolfsonian museum and library for a tour of the facilities and a look at some of the 11,000 vintage postcards in our collection. Professors Claudia Busch, Eric Peterson, and Michelle Cintron brought their students over to the beach so that they could get an idea of exactly what would be involved in designing a museum that would have to house and exhibit a large postcard collection. After their tour of the gallery spaces, the students came down to the main reading room of our special collections and rare books library to view some of the more unusual postcards in our collection and to listen to and participate in a discussion about some of the less obvious environmental, storage, lighting, and other considerations that would be involved in designing a museum exclusively devoted to preserving and exhibiting vintage postcards in the subtropics. One important preservation and access idea that proved popular was the idea of digitizing and projecting images of postcards on the gallery walls to avoid exposing the fragile originals to damaging UV light. Since postcards were originally designed for travel, one of the professors suggested the possibility of creating a non-static display in which images of postcards might zip around the gallery spaces as if they were flying through post office sorting machines. All of us here at the Wolfsonian look forward to the students’ future research visits this semester and to seeing the final projects dreamed up by these budding architects.

Here are a couple of the more unsual poscards (made of leather and wood) seen by this group:

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.