The presidential portraits that hang in Thomas Great Hall were de-installed today to protect them during repair work on the building’s roof. Professional art-handlers were hired to take the paintings down, to pack them, and then transport them off campus to climate-controlled art storage. The portraits will return in November of 2016.
More information about the portraits can be found here: http://triarte.brynmawr.edu/PRT537
Two of Bryn Mawr College’s prized Mary Cassatt prints are now on view in Yokohama, Japan. The artist’s retrospective at the Yokohama Museum of Art includes 80 works, many of which are on loan from museums all over the world. The exhibition travels to a second venue, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, in September.
Bryn Mawr has loaned Afternoon Tea Party and Woman Bathing (see below). Both are part of a series of ten color prints exploring the domestic activities and roles of women in the nineteenth century. Cassatt translated her admiration of Japanese ukiyo-e prints into this series, all ten of which are included in the current retrospective.
Bryn Mawr’s Collections Manager, Marianne Weldon, couriered the prints to Japan, ensuring their safe arrival. The crate had to be inspected in Philadelphia by TSA, after which point it was never left alone. Either Marianne, or a US Customs-assigned security agent, was with the works of art as they traveled first from Philadelphia to JFK airport, where they were placed on a pallet with works from other institutions, and then onto Tokyo, Japan.
Once in Tokyo the works were transported by truck to the Yokohama Museum of Art (along with couriers from the represented institutions) to await Japanese Customs Agents, who authorized opening the crate for installation.
As you can see, the prints have arrived safely and are a wonderful addition to the exhibition.
For more information about the exhibition, visit:
http://yokohama.art.museum/eng/exhibition/index/20160625-466.html
With its golden pigments and delicately painted detail, the 19th-century Japanese screen in Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections illustrates the moment when the “shining prince” Genji first sees his future beloved, Murasaki.
Donated by Asian art historian Helen Burwell Chapin, Class of 1915, the screen is the work of Kanō Seisen’in Osanobu, the last great master of the Kanō School of painting, a four-century-long tradition central to the visual cultural and heritage of Japan.
A significant piece of Japan’s cultural heritage—scholars believe it was part of a Shogunal dowry—the screen is in need of restoration. And Bryn Mawr is on the job.
With support from a $20,000 grant from the Sumitomo Foundation of Japan, Collection Manager for Art and Artifacts Marianne Weldon will be overseeing conservation work to be undertaken by Nishio Conservation Studios in Washington, D.C., one of the leading conservators of Asian art in the United States. Over the past year, Weldon has been working with History of Art doctoral student Anna Moblard Meier M.A. ’14 to identify and evaluate the College’s Japanese art collections.
Moblard Meier played an especially critical role in identifying the potential importance of the screen, doing background research on the work and the artist, and determining that the previously unidentified screen depicts a key moment from The Tale of Genji, a classic work of Japanese literature.
An incredibly rare example of Osanobu’s adept homage and adaptation of classical conventions, the screen tempted curators from the Philadelphia Museum of Art when they reviewed it last summer as they prepared for the exhibition Ink and Gold: Art of the Kanō. But although the pigments and painting are intact, the work had been structurally damaged over time and too fragile to be displayed.
The restoration of the screen will take about two years, and when the work is completed, the screen will be displayed in Canaday Library.
Exhibition opening at Bryn Mawr College January 22nd
The creative vitality of the continually evolving uprisings commonly referred to as the Arab Spring is captured in this immersive multimedia exhibition on loan from the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The exhibition’s curator, Christiane Gruber, Associate Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Michigan, will give the exhibition’s opening talk Thursday evening, January 22nd. Professor Gruber has published widely on contemporary issues in Islamic art, including a recent piece in Newsweek on the history of images of Mohammed in Islamic art
Along with the exhibition, Bryn Mawr is welcoming Ganzeer, one of the artists whose work figured prominently in the uprisings against the Mubarak and military governments in Egypt. Ganzeer will be meeting with classes and informal groups during the last week of January, and will give a public talk Monday evening, January 26, and participate in a public conversation on Tuesday, January 27th. The College has just acquired Ganzeer’s new set of silkscreen prints, “Of Course,” that recognize demonstrators who were brutalized by the military. The prints will be featured in the exhibition. Ganzeer has also just opened a new show at the Leila Heller Gallery in New York City that was featured in an article in The Nation.
See the exhibition’s website for additional information about the programs and speakers:
http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibitions.html
See an article in The Nation about Ganzeer’s current exhibition in New York:
http://www.newsweek.com/koran-does-not-forbid-images-prophet-298298
See a recent Newsweek article on Images of Mohammed:
http://www.newsweek.com/koran-does-not-forbid-images-prophe…
Ganzeer. “Of Course, Blue Bra Lady” Silkscreen print, 2014. (2015.6.5)
Look out, New York City! A piece from our very own Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections has already been carefully packaged and placed on a truck bound for the Cooper Hewitt Museum.
Bed. ca. 1885-1887. Designed by Lockwood De Forest. Manufactured by Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company. Chased brass over teak core, perforated copper. Gift of Mary Patterson McPherson, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1978-1997. Bryn Mawr College Collections. Photographed by Karen Mauch. (Deanery.454)
Our bronze nineteenth-century Indian headboard will be featured in one of the new exhibitions at the December 12, 2014 grand reopening of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Passion for the Exotic: Lockwood de Forest, Frederic Church.
Opening Exhibitions at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in December 2014. From http://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/opening-exhibitions/. Accessed 23 October 2014.
The headboard is part of a set of two that were designed by American artist, Lockwood de Forest. De Forest is probably best known for his introduction of East Indian art to the American and European aesthetic in his role of a designer and importer of exotic goods. The headboard is one example of the many pieces created by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in India and exported to New York for de Forest’s business. The headboard is made of chased brass and perforated copper panels decorated with East Indian floral and animal motifs over a teak wood frame.
The headboard made its way to Bryn Mawr College by way of Mary Elizabeth Garrett, who purchased the headboard from de Forest for her Baltimore home. In 1904 Garrett left Baltimore to live with her partner, M. Carey Thomas, at Bryn Mawr College. Garrett brought a large quantity of her furniture with her, including the headboard. The headboard is just one of many examples of de Forest at Bryn Mawr College, as he worked closely with Garrett and Thomas from 1894-1909 decorating and furnishing a large portion of their campus home in the College Deanery. While the College Deanery no longer stands, de Forest’s work remains part of the college’s collections and can be viewed online on TriArte, the art and artifacts database of Bryn Mawr’s special collections.
Beds in Mary E. Garrett’s Bedroom, Deanery, Bryn Mawr College. February 9, 1968. Photographed by Karl A. Dimler. (PAB_Deanery_072)
De Forest’s East Indian aesthetic designs, as well as the work of his former teacher Frederic Church, are the subject of the exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt museum. The exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to view our headboard alongside other pieces designed by de Forest. In addition, the Cooper Hewitt Museum is located in the former residence of Andrew Carnegie, who commissioned de Forest to decorate his library in his signature East Indian style, which remains part of the museum’s collection today.
Family Library in the Andrew Carnegie House, New York, 1898-1901. Designed by Lockwood De Forest. Image from the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York and the Museum of the City of New York, New York. Published in Roberta A. Mayer, Lockwood de Forest: Furnishing the Gilded Age with a Passion for India (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) p. 168, fig. 148.
This exhibition will provide an exciting opportunity to see a piece of Bryn Mawr College history embedded in a broader narrative of international design.
The Cooper Hewitt Museum has announced December 12, 2014 as the date of their grand re-opening.
This semester, John and Joanne Payson rounded off a year of exceptional generosity by donating a collection of twentieth-century prints and print portfolios to Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections.
Teddo, Paul Cadmus, 1985, Lithograph, 9 7/8” x 10 ½” (2014.11.6)
The donation followed a substantial loan of American art used to form the student-curated exhibition, “A Century of Self-Expression: Modern American Art in the Collection of John and Joanne Payson,” which will hang in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room of Canaday Library until June 1, 2014. The students, members of the 360° course cluster “Exhibiting Modern Art,” had the opportunity to work closely with the Paysons on the exhibition and accompanying publications, programs, and special events. The course cluster blog at http://modernart360.blogs.brynmawr.edu/ tells the story of this amazing year in the voices — and with the images — of the students.
Lion of Prague, Jack Levine, 1982, Etching and Aquatint, 11 1/8” x 9” (2014.11.10)
The recent donation includes work by Jack Levine, Isabel Bishop and Paul Cadmus, who are all featured prominently in “A Century of Self-Expression,” as well as by Doris Rosenthal, Ben Shahn, and Bernarda Bryson Shahn. Like many of the works in the exhibition, the prints appeal largely to a realistic style of representation that persisted alongside more radical and experimental visual trends that are often thought to characterize twentieth-century art. The prints cover a wide range of subjects, including portraits, political, mythological, and biblical stories, and scenes of modern city life.
It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with Paysons and especially to catch up with Joanne, who received both her AB and MA from Bryn Mawr College. The new prints will serve as a source of interest and inspiration for students involved in the recent exhibition and for future generations of Bryn Mawr scholars.
Pygmalion, Jack Levine, 1977, Lithograph, 19 1/2” x 12 1/2” (2014.11.1)
Portfolio of Eight Etching 1927-1934, Isabel Bishop, 1989, Etching 14 ½” x 11 ½” (2014.11.11.a-j)
Untitled
Quita Brodhead (American, 1901-2002)
1961-1962
Oil on canvas
25 1/4 in. x 21 7/8 in. (64.14 cm x 55.56 cm)
The William and Uytendale Scott Memorial Study Collection of Works by Women Artists, Gift of Bill Scott (2006.1.30)
Beginning February 8th, 2014 “Untitled” by Quita Brodhead will be on exhibit at the Woodmere Art Museum as part of an exhibition entitled: Quita Brodhead: Bold Strokes. The painting was donated to Bryn Mawr College Special Collections in 1991 as part of The William and Uytendale Scott Memorial Study Collection of Works by Women Artists, Gift of Bill Scott. The exhibition runs through June 1, 2014. More information can be found at:
http://woodmereartmuseum.org/exhibition/quita-brodhead-bold-strokes/
2013 MacPherson Curatorial Fellow Nava Streiter interviews exhibition curator (and former MacPherson Fellow) Anna Moblard Meier on “Beneath the Printed Pattern: Display and Disguise in Ukioy-e Bijinga.”
Utagawa Kunisada II, Mitsuji Near a Carriage in the Snow, ca. 1851 (detail). Bryn Mawr College Special Collections; gift of Margery Hoffman Smith, Class of 1911.
Nava Streiter: “Beneath the Printed Pattern: Display and Disguise in Ukiyo-e Bijinga,” is an exhibition of ukiyo-e prints from the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, on display in the Class of 1912 Rare Books Room in Canaday Library between September 25, 2013 and December 20, 2013. I sat down with the show’s curator, Anna Moblard Meier, who is a third year graduate student in Bryn Mawr’s History of Art department, to discuss what the show says about idealization, eroticism, marketing and politics in nineteenth-century Edo.
N: The written description of the exhibition notes that the bijinga, or beautiful people, who appear in most of the artworks are idealized representations, carefully designed to convey particular messages. It strikes me that many of the images in the show are also constructed as scenes from the everyday life of Edo. What do you think it means to combine idealization and apparent realism in this way?
A: While the images do depict people shopping in the capital city or visiting the famous places of Edo, the “everyday” quality of the works is highly orchestrated. Every detail of these images, from the posture of the depicted figures to the surrounding context, is constructed in such a way as to create a specific meaning.
The section on famous places makes a good example here. There’s a long-standing tradition in Japanese art of the meisho, or the famous place. This tradition comes out of poetry and painting, and the representation of places tied to the royal family, to natural phenomena (like cherry blossoms). In ukiyo-e, representations of the famous places of Edo draw from this older tradition. In them, the idea of the meisho is applied to Edo, the capital city, as a group of new famous places, literally marketing the Shogun’s capital.
In the case of bijinga, picture of beautiful people, as the guest speaker Julie Nelson Davis explained in her lecture at the exhibition’s opening, these images are also filled with markers. For example, ukiyo-e makes many references to the classical tradition of the Heian court — the heyday of Japanese court culture. To the contemporary viewer, a woman depicted reading poetry or seated amongst stacks of books would have been recognized as a courtesan of that was not only cultured and hence desirable, but also high-ranking and expensive. (You can see an image of such a woman in the show.) These sorts of references were common, especially because literacy in Edo was extremely high during this period.
N: Could we describe the prints in this show as popular art?
A: Yes, although we could even question whether they would originally have been understood as art. It wasn’t until the Meiji restoration in the late 1860s that a word for art appeared in Japanese.
N: Is there any ideological or etymological connection between the word for art and the word bijinga?
A: The Japanese term for art is bijutsu and I don’t think it has anything to do with bijinga. I don’t think the western aesthetic notion that art and beauty are inherently combined can be applied to ukiyo-e works or the idea of bijinga, which, again, literally translates as pictures of beautiful people. Still, ideas of beauty, the beauty of the natural world, and the ability to represent these beauties are central to all forms of Japanese art — to what, in western terms, would be call the “applied arts.”
N: In light of Japanese ideas of art and beauty, what does it mean for your show on beautiful people to include a section on representation of natural phenomena?
A: In addition to bijinga, the majority of ukiyo-e artists also produced pictures of birds and flowers (or kacho-e). Although they were part of a minor genre, these images of nature drew from long traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting. Like references to classical literature and the Heian court, the formal qualities of these works tied ukiyo-e to a prestigious artistic lineage. I hope the viewer sees a parallel between the attentive detail of these depictions and of the show’s bijinga imagery. Also, throughout the show, women are depicted in elaborate kimonos, and the textile designs are central to the compositions. The natural forms of flora and fauna served as a basis for these designs.
N: Speaking of textiles, it’s interesting that the idea of the beautiful person was so tied to the idea of the beautiful garment. I understand many of the images are advertisements for the Yoshiwara, or red light district of Edo, but their eroticism seems very subtle. There’s so much clothing! What am I missing?
A: The eroticism in the prints is subtle to us, but it wouldn’t have been subtle to the original audience. For example, during the Edo period, the back of a woman’s neck was considered incredibly sexy and so were her wrists. Also, the way the kimono is folded in a lot of ukiyo-e drew attention to specific curves. Many of the images would have been read almost like pin-ups to Edo period viewers, although they don’t necessarily read that way to modern western ones. That’s one of the key elements of the show — to give the contemporary viewer access to the ways these images would have functioned during their time period and to recreate a sense of them as complex, legible surfaces containing signs that are very specific.
For instance, there’s an interesting innuendo in a photographically reproduced picture of a geisha that is in the show’s bookcase display. The image is from a series by the famous artist Kitagawa Utamaro. In it, the viewer doesn’t see the geisha’s patron, but sees her holding a man’s robe. There’s a reference to classical painting on the man’s kimono and, from that image, the viewer would know the patron was a merchant. Merchants in that period were not allowed to show their wealth, even though they were amongst the wealthiest people in Edo. So they would have a beautiful silk paintings embedded inside their kimonos as a private display of their wealth and prestige.
N: So the only nudity in a show about pleasure district prints is off-stage nudity! That’s great. Would the merchant have commissioned the print? Are the high classical references a form of posturing?
A: In these sorts of images, the patron of the Yoshiwara was represented as a sophisticated, cultured gentleman, but I think that’s more something that’s being sold to the merchant patron than the merchant patron commissioning it as a way of self-identifying.
N: The prints weren’t commissioned? How and why were they made?
A: Several scholars, including Julie Nelson Davis, have suggested that the brothels themselves might have commissioned these works as advertisements, and it’s clear that textile designers and theaters also commissioned prints. However, there’s a lot we don’t know, because of the complexity of ukiyo-e production. It was incredibly complicated to make these prints. A publisher would commission an artist to make a drawing. The names we associate with ukiyo-e, like Hiroshige or Hokusai, were the people who made the drawings. Their work would be given to a lead designer, who would transfer it onto a wooden key-block. Then the blocks would be given to carvers. There were two different types of carvers. The most skilled ones would carve the most important parts, including the contour lines and the key-block. Less skilled carvers would cut all of the additional blocks that gave color and detail to the prints. Next the carved blocks would be given to printers. Printed images would be given to the publisher, who would sell them in the streets and shops of Edo. There were also travelling book salesmen, and shops where you could buy prints.
N: So although it seems like research on ukiyo-e prints tends to focus on prominent artists, the works were really made by a huge number of people. Is the emphasis on individuals a western misinterpretation, or were people in Edo interested in celebrity artists?
A: Julie Nelson’s book, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, makes the argument that Kitagawa Utamaro, for instance, was essentially a brand. The publisher who made Utamaro a household name, created a persona for him, which made the prints more marketable. So the name Utamaro carried weight in Edo, but a weight comparable today, for instance, to Coca-Cola or to some other big brand name.
N: Western responses to ukiyo-e prints are fascinating. How has your perspective informed your work on the show?
A: I’m realtively new to the field, but I’ve been studying Japanese now for two years and have heard many of Julie Nelson’s lectures about the Edo period and Japanese art in general. Julie’s been incredibly generous and kind in sharing her knowledge!
My interest, really, has been in considering, from the western perspective, what happens when these prints appeared in western culture. Many ukiyo-e works survived in the west from a time period when, because of natural disasters or the sentiments of the Meiji restoration, many others they were destroyed in Japan. However, in the west, the surviving works were largely decontextualized and misunderstood.
In Japan in the 1870-90s, ukiyo-e was largely censored, and Japan was struggling to promote a new national identity and to avoid becoming a colonized country. In presenting itself to the West, it wanted to promote the new Meiji Japan as modern and industrial, while still preserving the value of its ancient and complex culture. Although ukiyo-e formed the basis of western visions of Japan, it did not fit into the image of “new Japan” that was being formulated and promoted internally. Japan’s new government was trying to figure out how to place the country as a prominent, new force in a globalizing world. For example, during this period, the government realigned its identity with Shinto over Buddhism. A lot of incredible Japanese Buddhist paintings have come to the west because they were not valued during the Meiji restoration. In viewing ukiyo-e and reading its histories, the first of which were written by westerners, all of these things come into play.
N: Speaking of Buddhism, is there a religious aspect to the works in the show? Is the idea of the beautiful person religious in any way?
A: Not really. The term ukiyo-e, means pictures of the floating world. Ukiyo literally means “floating world” and the –e ending means “pictures of.” There are Buddhist connotations associated with the term ukiyo, for instance, the term references a poem that compares life’s ephemerality to a gourd floating on a river. In the culture of Edo, interest in and contemplation of life’s transience are replaced by interest in the transience of pleasure. There was a celebration of enjoyment, rather than a meditation on the fragility of human life. So ukiyo-e, in the Edo period, becomes a celebration of all life’s pleasure, including the pleasures of the Yoshiwara, the pleasures of the theater, and the pleasures of looking at nature’s beauty.
Katsushika Shigenobu, Bathing Scene, n.d., Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, gift of Margery Hoffman Smith, Class of 1911
There’s a lot of parody in ukiyo-e, especially political parody. There’s as much parody of court culture as there is reverence for it. Some theories set the idea of the floating world as a sort of cultural vent for the Tokugawa shogunate. The shogunate regulated life closely during the Edo period and, in order to maintain its dominance over the rising merchant class – the lowest rung of society, but also the rising wealth of society – the shogun passed all sorts of sumptuary laws. Some scholars have suggested that the Yoshiwara and idea of the ukiyo-e’s celebration of all the pleasures of life is sort of a vent for the pressure those laws placed on the lower classes. However regulated, the Yoshiwara was a place where the merchants and townspeople of Edo could feel free and unconstrained by the strict neo-Confucianism of the day. Still, there are any number of scholars who would say that the Edo period wasn’t as structured as all that, and sumptuary laws were very difficult to enforce.
N: So these pictures are fairly radical?
A: Yes, as much as contemporary advertisement can be. Still, sumptuary laws also applied to them. Artists and publishers were required to print seals on all ukiyo-e, so those guilty of breaking laws could be punished. For instance, Kitagawa Utamaro, who I’ve mentioned already, was imprisoned for transgressing these laws.
N: You’ve done a gorgeous job with the show, and it’s appropriately subtle, but, as we’ve discussed, subtlety can sometimes mask surprising content, especially for viewers who are relatively unfamiliar with a visual language. What do you think it does to transplant these prints to our modern, Bryn Mawr gallery?
A: I think that’s a difficulty for the show. One of the things I really wanted to avoid was having another show entitled “Ukiyo-e: the Floating World,” because that’s the most common, introductory way people encounter ukiyo-e. The euphemism of the name is often misinterpreted. I think most people don’t understand that ukiyo-e is largely about the brothel and theater districts, and that the theater districts were a places where prostitution was also conducted. So what was bought and sold in the floating world sometimes gets lost to a western viewer. The reason I chose Bijinga as a specific theme was that I wanted to try to begin to unpack one specific type of image in order to provide a deeper understanding of Edo period prints. Whether viewers interact with it long enough to realize what’s there – that’s always a problem.
N: Well they’ll realize it when they read this. They’re going to be scandalized.
A: The number of times the guest speaker said prostitute made me smile.
N: But there are so many words for prostitute!
A: But they’re mostly euphemisms! There’s only one point in the text of the show that I say sex-worker, but I think it’s important to keep that raw reality in mind when we’re using all these terms and descriptions like courtesan and court lady and “elegant woman in a kimono.” There are so many euphemisms in the terminology of ukiyo-e itself. Ukiyo-e is a euphemism for pleasure districts, which were largely run on indentured servitude, which was a harsh reality.
N: What do you want viewers to take away from the show?
A: The purpose of the show is to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of ukiyo-e. It’s the tip of the iceberg, as far as that goes. Having come to the subject from western scholarship (and the study of late-19th century Vienna and Germany), I’ve seen how these works were appreciated but completely misunderstood. The show is my effort to realign the discussion according to a fuller original context.
October, 2013.
Complementing the 9th biennial Bryn Mawr College Graduate Group Symposium, an exhibition of domestic artifacts and imagery is being held in the Kaiser Reading Room in Carpenter Library on the theme of “Home: Departure and Destination.” Held in honor of Bryn Mawr Professor Emeritus Barbara Miller Lane, the Symposium reflects her notable research on architecture, culture, and the role of the home.
In this exhibition, we endeavor to capture just some of the home’s many iterations in both visual and material culture. In doing so, we also wanted to represent the broad range of disciplines called upon in the Symposium to define the home.
Whether it’s the objects from a local Bryn Mawr home, or those intimately tied to the functions of the generic home, we hope you find a way to meaningfully engage with the diverse range of photographs, artifacts, manuscripts and decorative objects on display here. In our choices, we sought to engage with the ways each object represents the home as a dynamic, multivalent category capable of physically, psychically, and emotionally defining us as individuals and as a society.
The exhibition opens on October 4th and will remain on view through the Fall term.
For most students at Bryn Mawr, “the Deanery” 
is an unfamiliar name. Half a century ago, however, this would certainly not have been the case. The Deanery was the home of the first Dean and second President of the college, M. Carey Thomas. When she moved there in 1885 at the age of 29, it was a modest Victorian cottage of five rooms, situated downhill from what was then the central campus building, Taylor Hall. Thomas lived in the Deanery for almost five decades, sharing it first with her friend Mamie Gwinn and later with her friend and partner, Mary Garrett. In 1896 and again in 1908, the building was renovated and expanded, ultimately becoming a sprawling 46-room mansion filled with the art and furniture that Thomas and Garret collected on their travels. While Thomas lived there, she entertained such famous figures as Henry James, Bertrand Russell, and Anna Howard Shaw, but she also held Senior receptions and other events for Bryn Mawr students.
When Thomas moved away from the campus in 1933, she left the Deanery and most of its contents to the Alumnae Association for use as the college’s Alumnae Center and Inn. It stood for another 35 years as a living memorial to the President, until it was demolished in 1968 for the construction of Canaday Library, which stands on the site today. In 1974, the Deanery’s garden was transformed into the Blanca Noel Taft Memorial Garden, which can still be visited behind Canaday.
Over time, the memory of the building, which had as much personality as the women who lived there, has faded from Bryn Mawr’s collective consciousness. I had never heard of the Deanery before I was assigned to work on this project, despite the fact that an exhibition called “The Deanery Remembered” was held in the Canaday foyer in 1985, as part of the college’s Centennial Celebration.
As work on the project has progressed, archival material from that exhibition as well as hundreds of works of decorative art have resurfaced. One of the most exciting aspects of 
the project is the search for objects around campus that were used in the Deanery; once found, many are brought to Special Collections for cataloguing and conservation. The “treasure hunt” has brought to light beautiful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suites of furniture, charming bronze statues and figurines, and fragments of the brass filigree stencils and painted burlap panels that decorated the Deanery’s ceilings, among many other wonderful finds. As we dust off the china and bring the chairs out of their forgotten hiding places, we are able to slowly reconstruct what was clearly a unique and amazing place.
We have made incredible progress this summer in reassembling the Deanery Collection, but much work remains to be done. I am looking forward to the end result of our endeavors: the exhibition that will bring the Deanery back to life and remind us again of the significance of Bryn Mawr’s heritage collections. Check out the Deanery portfolio on Triarte!
by Rachel Starry, Graduate Student in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology