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.