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.

SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT

Some wonderful gifts arrived this week just in time for inclusion in our up-and-coming exhibition +five: Recent Acquisitions from The Wolfsonian Collection. This show which will open on April 23, will highlight some of the gifts and acquisitions that have come into the museum in the course of the last five years. The most recent additions to the Wolfsonian collection had been sent to the museum library by collector, friend, and donor, Vicki Gold Levi.

We first encountered Vicki nearly a decade ago when she came down to Miami in the course of looking for materials to be included in a book project she was preparing for publication in collaboration with Steve Heller (another Wolfsonian donor and supporter). For some time, Vicki had been voraciously collecting ephemeral items documenting U.S.-Cuba tourist trade relations in the pre-Castro era. Her project culminated in the publication of Cuba Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Design by the Princeton Architectural Press in 2002. Soon after her first visit to the Wolfsonian, Vicki arranged to have the bulk of that collection gifted to the Wolfsonian library, where some of the hundreds of ephemeral items were soon after exhibited in one of our galleries. Highlights from her donation can be seen online at the following web address: http://www.wolfsonian.org/collections/c9/indexvgl.html Other items from Vicki’s personal collection and loans from some of the materials she donated to the Wolfsonian also appeared in another exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2008: ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today.

Following that first meeting and subsequent donation, Vicki has not been idle. In 2004 she published yet another book entitled: Times Square Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Broadway—again donating to our institution some of the colorful items in the wake of the project’s completion. A number of these gifts were exhibited in a library display in 2005 X: A Decade of Collecting when the Wolfsonian celebrated the acquisitions that had come in during our first ten years as a public institution. http://librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Decade%20Collecting/DC%20displays.htm

Once again Vicki has sent some wonderful materials our way, including some programs, sheet music covers, postcards, and periodicals. All of these materials will be added to our Web catalog http://207.67.203.78/W10054 with direct links in the records to digital images. Included in this blog are a few of the items being considered for the +five exhibition which I offer up as a teaser.

VISIT BY NORTH BEACH SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Over the course of the last two days, the Wolfsonian hosted four North Beach Senior High School student tours in the library, where the sixty student participants were given the opportunity to look at a range of rare books, periodicals, and ephemera on the subject of African American history. The lecture discussions in the library centered on the troubled history of race relations in America and the long struggle of African Americans for full recognition of their civil rights. When asked when the Civil Right movement began, the overwhelming consensus among the students was to reference Dr. Martin Luther King and to assume that the struggle had began in the 1960s. Using objects from our collection and library, we encouraged them to consider the visual evidence that suggested that the struggle for equality and rights had begun much earlier and had progressed in fits and starts building up to the successes achieved in the sixties.

We began by considering a bust of world heavyweight boxing champion Joseph Louis Barrow (better known as Joe Louis, 1914-1981) and my assertion that his history might reveal much about changing race relations in the United States. Both of Louis’s biological parents were children of former slaves, and his family had worked as sharecroppers in the South until (like more than a million other African Americans) they migrated North after the First World War to escape KKK terror and poverty. But it was in the boxing ring that Louis made his own important contribution to the fight against racism. Although he had lost a 1936 match to the German prize fighter, Max Schmeling—(which the Nazis touted as proof of Aryan racial superiority)—a second bout had been arranged for the summer of 1938. Just weeks before the scheduled rematch, Louis visited the White House where President Roosevelt encouraged him to use his muscles to demonstrate to the world that the fallacy of the Nazi “superman” myth. Louis did not disappoint. The fight in Yankee Stadium was broadcast live by radio around the globe, and caused a sensation when Louis knocked Schmeling to the mat three times within the first two minutes of the match, with Schmeling’s trainer throwing in the towel on the third fall. Louis’s victory, (coupled with African American runner Jesse Owen’s earlier successes at the 1936 Olympic games held in Berlin), helped persuade Americans to reject the racist doctrines espoused by Nazi propagandists. Little more than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Louis enlisted in the army and afterwards allowed his image to be used to encourage other African Americans to do likewise, and when reporters questioned him about his decision to enlist into the racially-segregated armed services, he replied that there were “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.” Although this next poster is not one from our collection, I could not resist including it here as a perfect example of how Joe Louis's fame and image was used to persuade other Americans to join the fight.

After contemplating Louis’s statue staring out from behind the glass walls of the library stacks, the students entered the library main reading room to look at a wide variety of books, periodicals, and other printed paper materials documenting the experiences of African Americans in the united States. The groups talked about Jim Crow laws and segregation; the promises for better treatment held out to African American men who served their country with pride in the First World War, and the disappointing reality that awaited Black veterans returning home from military service. We talked about lynchings and looked at examples of racial stereotyping from the twenties and thirties.

We also talked of the Great Migration of African Americans (like Joe Louis’s family) to Northern cities in the 1920s and 1930s; the crippling effects of the Great Depression made worse by racism; the trials and tribulations of the nine “Scottsboro Boys” who barely escaped lynching only to endure years in prison during a slew of trials, appeals, mistrials, and retrials in a legal campaign organized by the Communist Party of the United States of America; the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to provide some measure of economic security and parity for unemployed African Americans within the federal relief programs.

Finally, we wrapped up by coming full circle back to Joe Louis and other African Americans who were encouraged to participate in helping Uncle Sam win the Second World War, cognizant that there was still much to be done for civil rights in America, but only after the threat of the Nazis’ New Order was eradicated.