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.