Category Archives: Students

Theory and Practice: Students in Spring course produce exhibition and education program Part 4

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making our worldThe Spring 2013 course “The Curator in the Museum” at Bryn Mawr College mixes theory into practice in the new exhibition “Making our World” located on the second floor of Canaday Library. Through readings and guest lectures related to the broader course theme of analyzing the “institution” of the museum and all its related parts, we integrated these models into our own project exhibition and corresponding education program for local high school students.

The following updates — written and edited by students as part of the team-based approach to the entire project — are reports on our progress along the way. Please let us know your thoughts.

Oral Histories: Gathering Information and Making Connections

Student bloggers: Xingzhe He, Jennifer Rabowsky, Alison Whitney

Jennifer:

Courtney Pinkerton oral history interview with (clockwise from lower left) Jennifer Rabowsky, Xingzhe He, Pinkerton, Brian Wallace, and Alison Whitney.

Courtney Pinkerton oral history interview with (clockwise from lower left) Jennifer Rabowsky, Xingzhe He, Pinkerton, Brian Wallace, and Alison Whitney.


Back in late February, while sitting across from our first interviewee, Courtney Pinkerton, our nerves threatened to botch our first oral history.  Just a week before, we had sat down with Professor Brian Wallace and Educator Shari Osborn, where quite simply put, we were told that we were going to be conducting oral history interviews of Bryn Mawr alumna for the “Making Our World” exhibition.  The process seemed intimidating—there is a widely known, appropriate way to go about conducting these interviews—and all three of us had never done one before.  Luckily for us, Courtney was excited to participate, had a wonderful sense of humor, and was incredibly patient.  When we had to spend five minutes to figure out why our recorders weren’t working, this last quality turned out to be a godsend.  And, by the time we started the interview the ice had been broken and it was smooth sailing.

Courtney’s answers to our questions were engaging and, most importantly, were full of emotion.  She told us a humorous anecdote of a prank she performed sophomore year—she and two friends replace the flags from the Thomas Hall turrets with Texas flags—followed by more serious anecdotes about how Bryn Mawr helped her view her fiscal independence as a positive.  Courtney allowed us to see the influence that Bryn Mawr College had on her, and by the end of the interview we had captured a snapshot of Courtney’s life.   When we walked away, we were all excited that we had conducted a successful oral history interview.  But more so than this, we were excited that we had created something that would be accessioned into Bryn Mawr’s permanent collection, and that would be used as an integral part of “Making Our World”.

Xingzhe:

Xingzhe He interviewing Kimberly Blessing '97.

Xingzhe He interviewing Kimberly Blessing ’97.

I interviewed two alumnae, Margery Lee, who graduated in 1951 with a BA in History, and Kimberly Blessing, who graduated in 1997 with a degree in Computer Science. Kimberly was my first interviewee, and the interview was conducted over the phone. While I was a little nervous for my first oral history project, I became more relaxed as the conversation unfolded. Kimberly was an engaging and inspiring character, and it was truly a pleasure to share with her some of the best memories she has had at Bryn Mawr, the moments of accomplishment, difficulties and confusion she had encountered as a young college student.

Later I interviewed Ms. Lee in person. Almost 60 years have passed since she left Bryn Mawr, yet she is still deeply attached to the college and the place. She recalled the classes she loved while being an undergraduate, her role as the coordinator of her Garden Party, and her involvement with the alumnae association after graduation.

Alison:

I was the second person in our group to interview an alumna on our own, and I have to say, it was nerve-wracking. But I could not have interviewed a more charming, interesting woman than Jackie Koldin Levine, graduate of Bryn Mawr’s class of 1946. Jackie received her BA from Bryn Mawr in psychology, with a minor in political science, and has led a fulfilled life as a self-described “full time volunteer”.  Jackie has been very involved in national organizations for the National Jewish Community, and also with the Civil Rights Movement.

Jennifer Rabowsky and Alison Whitney during the Jackie Levine interview.

Jennifer Rabowsky and Alison Whitney during the Jackie Levine interview.

In our interview Jackie spoke proudly of her experiences marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, and attending the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She shared that she gained her strength at Bryn Mawr, a place where she learned to not be afraid and to express herself and her beliefs — even when others disagree. My favorite moment during our interview had to have been the discovery that Jackie lived in Rockefeller dorm, where I have lived for three years. I realized that the dorm room I am living in now has been occupied by incredible women like Jackie Levine (or even Jackie herself!) who have gone on to graduate from Bryn Mawr, achieve great things, and live fulfilled lives. I am proud to know that I am a part of that legacy.

Theory and Practice: Students in Spring course produce exhibition and education program Part 3

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making our worldThe Spring 2013 course “The Curator in the Museum” at Bryn Mawr College mixes theory into practice in the new exhibition “Making our World” located on the second floor of Canaday Library. Through readings and guest lectures related to the broader course theme of analyzing the “institution” of the museum and all its related parts, we integrated these models into our own project exhibition and corresponding education program for local high school students.

The following updates — written and edited by students as part of the team-based approach to the entire project — are reports on our progress along the way. Please let us know your thoughts.

Communicating Personality and Displaying a Life

Student blogger: Claudia Keep

Pinkerton (left) and Levine sections of Making Our World. Photograph by Alison Whitney

Pinkerton (left) and Levine sections of Making Our World. Photograph by Alison Whitney

One of the challenges of creating an exhibit around living individuals is how to portray their personality and the intangible qualities and values that they hold. How do you show something that is not an object? We were working with various objects that hopefully, when displayed together, would tell /create an accurate description of the individual. But how does one pick and choose the object or series of objects that would best represent the various qualities that made up these individuals?

One of the subjects of our “Making Our World” show, recent Bryn Mawr graduate Courtney Pinkerton had many interests and fascinating stories, but they did not all lend themselves to a visual display. Other subjects of our show were easier to portray visually, particularly as interviewees Jackie Levine and Margery Lee are both art collectors, and had donated numerous books and works of art to Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections.

Only having graduated last year, most of Courtney’s life experiences and interests have been defined by her time in high school, and most especially by her time at Bryn Mawr. Courtney’s time at Bryn Mawr was shaped greatly by her independence, and her work ethic. But how do you show independence, hard work, and commitment inside of a glass case?

To design and fill the portion of the display case reserved for Courtney, we had several objects to work with.  We had a portrait of Courtney Pinkerton and her mother taken last year at commencement, by artist Gilbert Plantinga; the pair of pink sequined cow girl boots that Courtney is wearing in the photograph; the flag of Courtney’s native state, Texas; a copy of the 3.5 resolution Courtney drafted and proposed at plenary; a copy of Courtney’s senior thesis on the intersection of popular culture and race relations; and finally, the crime blotter entry that describes the prank Courtney and her friends played where they switched the flags on Thomas Great Hall with Texas state flags.

Gilbert Plantinga Mary & Courtney Pinkerton, 2012 Digital print Seymour Adelman Fund Purchase Bryn Mawr College 2013.6.32

Gilbert Plantinga
Mary & Courtney Pinkerton, 2012
Digital print
Seymour Adelman Fund Purchase
Bryn Mawr College
2013.6.32

For the final display, we decided to include the portrait of Courtney, her pink boots, the Texas flag, the crime blotter, and the plenary resolution.  These objects seemed to both create an image of Courtney’s personality as well reflect on her time at Bryn Mawr, combining her personal experiences, like her flag prank, and experiences that all Bryn Mawr students could relate to, like a plenary resolution and the Bi-Co news crime blotter. The flag of Texas and her pink cowgirl boots were visual nods to her home state as well as too her strong sense of individuality (not many Bryn Mawr students regularly wear such striking boots). We decided not to include her thesis for, as stimulating as it might be to read, it would not look very compelling sitting in a glass case where no one could read it. We also felt that as almost all students will write a thesis during their time at Bryn Mawr, it did not communicate anything specific enough about Courtney or her time at Bryn Mawr.

We hoped to achieve a balance between objects and text to create a display that was both informative and visually arresting.

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Theory and Practice: Students in Spring course produce exhibition and education program part 2

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making our worldThe Spring 2013 course “The Curator in the Museum” at Bryn Mawr College mixes theory into practice in the new exhibition “Making our World” located on the second floor of Canaday Library. Through readings and guest lectures related to the broader course theme of analyzing the “institution” of the museum and all its related parts, we integrated these models into our own project exhibition and corresponding education program for local high school students.

The following updates — written and edited by students as part of the team-based approach to the entire project — are reports on our progress along the way. Please let us know your thoughts.

Decision-making and “Making Our World”

Student blogger: Christine Villanueva

Curator Jennifer Redmond, Director, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women's Education, introduces students to the Taking Her Place exhibition on the first day of the semester.

Curator Jennifer Redmond, Director, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, introduces students to the Taking Her Place exhibition on the first day of the semester.

Making Our World is a satellite exhibit centered on main exhibition Taking Her Place located in Canaday’s Rare Book Room. As a departure from Taking Her Place (an exhibition dedicated in exploring the early history of women’s higher education and Bryn Mawr College’s parallel role in providing women of the 19th/early-20th centuries public access beyond the domestic sphere), Making Our World focuses on four contemporary Bryn Mawr alumnae. Since the post-war period, Bryn Mawr has remained an environment that fosters the same intense intellectual curiosity that it did for women in the 19th/early 20th centuries, giving them public access to contribute more actively to the world around them.

The collected cultural ephemera that included (among other things) a computer, yearbooks, magazines, pamphlets, photographs, and artworks were donated by each of the four Bryn Mawr alumnae profiled. Each was generous with her time and participation with the project, but discretion as a value revealed itself of tantamount importance as research in developing the story and thematic elements of Making Our World. The alumnae profiled in Making Our World –Courtney Pinkerton, Kimberly Blessing, Margery Lee, and Jacqueline Levine –not only served as subjects in order to explore how experiences at Bryn Mawr shaped their lives, but also as women to celebrate. In that light, the exhibitions group sought to find objects that best represented and respected the women and their stories, and also how each have impacted Bryn Mawr’s community.

In the case of Margery Lee, Class of 1951, instead of focusing on her experiences as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College and her professional career, Lee insisted on focusing on the collection of artworks she donated to Bryn Mawr College and her numerous experiences in the art world. It was clear that her love of art she shared with her husband had been a vital and defining experience in her life. We respected her insistence on this significant aspect of her life by having her collection of artworks take center stage as indicative of Lee’s experiences and accomplishments from Bryn Mawr. She has donated over a dozen artworks to the college, and selecting which works to highlight from the impressive pool of candidates proved a fun task for the exhibitions group as executive “curators” of Making Our World. The objects group pulled several pieces for us to consider. These included a large-scale photograph by local and contemporary artist David Graham, a photograph by prolific and controversial artist Andres Serrano, a screen print by Warren Rohrer, and lithographs by Jim Dine and Jody Pinto.

Working out the installation details

Working out the installation details

Initially unsatisfied by the pool of works pulled by the objects group, we used triarte.brynmawr.edu, the arts and artifacts database of Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges to see what other works could be considered for the exhibit. We rejected the Jim Dine lithograph because we felt its heart motif too sentimental, obvious and ‘on the nose’ for the exhibit’s theme and title. We loved that Bryn Mawr owned an Andrew Serrano photograph of a close-up girl’s pierced ear and earring titled “Child Abuse II”, but felt the content of the photograph incongruous with our exhibit, and felt that Serrano’s piece could be better served in a future exhibit. Its inclusion in Making Our World felt forced to us given Serrano’s critical intent for the work. Rohrer’s screen print “Barks and Marks”, David Graham’s photograph of a William Penn impersonator “Bud Burkhart as William Penn, Three Arches, Levittown, PA”, and Jody Pinto’s landscape lithograph “Fingerspan for Climbers Rock Fairmount Park” were all seriously considered to display for the exhibit.

To be frank, however, we wondered if there were other works in Lee’s collection that held the same “big-name” artist recognition as Andres Serrano. Though our anticipated audience was not geared towards a distinctly informed art audience familiar with an artist like Serrano, we felt that, in part, by focusing on Margery Lee’s donated works as indicative of Bryn Mawr’s first-rate Art and Artifacts Collections, we wanted to display works that could carry broad-based appeal and familiarity, and excite an audience approaching not only Making Our World, but Bryn Mawr College itself. Although Rohrer, Graham, and Pinto’s works are of great quality and content (representative of Lee’s strong local connection to the Pennsylvania art scene), we were confident that Lee’s collection was deep enough to pull other works representative of Bryn Mawr’s world class art collection.

As such, we were excited to discover Lee had also donated George Segal and James Rosenquist serigraphs and an Ansel Adams photograph to the college. We wanted to include the Ansel Adams photograph “Dead Tree, Sunset Crater National Monument, Arizona” but were informed that it had already been exhibited in a prior show, Double Take, a year ago. Because of the photographic medium and the work’s age, conservation rules dictate that photographs only be displayed (under strict lighting guidelines) every few years. In order to preserve Adams’s work for future Mawrtyrs, we were unable to display it for this exhibit. However, the James Rosenquist serigraph “For the Young Artist”, an imitation of a color perception test called an Ishihara Color Test that spells out “ICU2RA*” (roughly “I see you too are a star), proved to be the fulcrum around which we based Margery Lee’s display. It was colorful and dynamic, it was by renowned Pop artist James Rosenquist (whose works are in the collection of MoMA and the Met, among others), and most importantly, its thematic content of mentorship between young and old generations proved a home run. As the only abstract, non-figurative artwork displayed, we chose the Rosenquist piece over Rohrer’s “Barks and Marks”.

For the Young Artist, James Rosenquist Serigraph on wove paper 2007.12.3

For the Young Artist, James Rosenquist
Serigraph on wove paper
2007.12.3

However, its size proved to be slightly detrimental and highly difficult within our display case. But, the exhibitions group pushed for its inclusion as it also worked well loosely juxtaposed next to alumna Kimberly Blessing’s technology oriented objects. We were happy with the other artworks the objects grouped pulled –Marlene Dumas’s “Supermodel”, John Kindness’s “China Cabinet Fly”, and David Graham’s William Penn photo –but their respective sizes proved too large for the space, and we found ourselves needing to cut one piece. Dumas’s “Supermodel” was a shoe-in; it is the only work by a female artist, and, we felt, played well against other featured alumna and art collector Jacqueline Levine’s displayed artworks of figuratively focused, and politically/racially charged (in different degrees) works. Ultimately, we chose etching “China Cabinet Fly” against Graham’s photograph because it paired better between the Rosenquist and Dumas prints.


Upon reflection, perhaps it would have proved better to mix up the displayed artworks, exhibiting the large-scale William Penn photograph instead in order to challenge audience expectations. But, as exhibition designers, we stand strongly behind our decisions to display other works against others, as all decisions were reached thoughtfully and collaboratively. We feel that the final three artworks exhibited for Margery Lee cohesively celebrate both her and the college’s art collection, and more broadly, the community oriented engaged learning of Making Our World.

Theory and practice: Students in Spring course produce exhibition and education program Part 1

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making our worldThe Spring 2013 course “The Curator in the Museum” at Bryn Mawr College mixes theory into practice in the new exhibition “Making our World” located on the second floor of Canaday Library. Through readings and guest lectures related to the broader course theme of analyzing the “institution” of the museum and all its related parts, we integrated these models into our own project exhibition and corresponding education program for local high school students.

The following updates — written and edited by students as part of the team-based approach to the entire project — are reports on our progress along the way. Please let us know your thoughts.

Guest Lecturer Dr. Bruce Altshuler

Student blogger: Adriana Grossman

Bruce Altshuler, New York University

Bruce Altshuler, New York University

On February 18th, the Curator in the Museum class was lucky to have Dr. Bruce Altshuler as a guest lecturer. Dr. Altshuler is currently the Director of the Program in Museum Studies at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University, and part of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA/USA), the American Association of Museums, and the College Art Association. It was particularly exciting to be able to speak to someone currently active in the field of museum studies, given the potential beginnings of a museum studies department at Bryn Mawr College. He is also the author of Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863–1959, and is currently at work on the second volume.

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Though we were all initially a little intimidated by Dr. Altshuler’s background, a congenial tone was set from the very beginning of the class period when he asked us all to introduce ourselves and explain why we were interested in the field of museum studies. Every answer varied, proving just how many other concentrations could lend themselves to the field and how broad the field itself is. Dr. Altshuler himself studied philosophy before entering the art world. He spoke to us about his beginnings in the commercial art world, working as a dealer with Zabriski Gallery. Zabriski Gallery specializes in Dada, Surrealism, American Modernism, photography, and contemporary art, the last of which is Dr. Altshuler’s primary area of interest, along with the history of exhibitions. He then told us a little about his experiences as director of the Noguchi Museum from 1992 to 1998.

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The last topic that we discussed was museum studies. As Dr. Altshuler made clear to us in telling us about his varied career, museum studies is a field that can be applied in a broad range of ways, the direction of which ultimately depends upon personal preference and the research that one chooses to undertake. The Museum Studies program has been offered at New York University for over three decades, and is still relatively young as a field of study. Dr. Altshuler suggested that this was perhaps because the field is hard to define given how much it has to encompass. Indeed, museum studies requires academic work to engage museum theory and practice, including the history of the institutions as well as the artworks within them, as well as preparation to be involved with more hands-on roles in the workings of a museum. (We recently got to do a little hands-on work ourselves, and will continue to be doing so as our class exhibition “Making Our World” progresses.) In other words, it is everything to do with running a museum.

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As was made clear in our discussions with Dr. Altshuler, museum studies is a field that will only continue to grow. Since its inception, it is a field that has come to many different institutions and is still burgeoning, as is evidenced by the suggestion of such a field of study at Bryn Mawr College.

 

 

 

ANTH B204-001 North American Archaeology

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Today students in North American Archaeology, taught by Professor Richard Davis, used objects from special collections to learn how to examine them. Information about the manufacture and use of the artifacts was gleaned from this visual examination. Students will continue to work with our special collections throughout this course.

In this photo students are examining a stone blade, one of over 1600 stone tools in the college’s holdings.

 

 

Among the other objects used for today’s class were pottery, pipes and one stone game piece called a “chunky stone”.  For more information about the game Chunkey see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunkey.

 

 

 

 Interested in knowing more about the anthropology collection?…..

The anthropology collection includes more than 8,000 objects from around the world. Frederica de Laguna (Class of 1927), the founder of Bryn Mawr’s Anthropology Department, was instrumental in the creation and growth of this important collection in the 1950s and 1960s.

The largest portion of the anthropology holdings is the William S. Vaux Collection, a gift from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, which includes archaeological artifacts from North, Central, and South America and pre-historic Europe.

Other important collections include the Twyeffort-Hollenback Collection of Southwest Pottery and Native American Ethnography, the George and Anna Hawks Vaux ’35, M.A. ’41 Collection of Native American Basketry; the Ward and Miriam Coffin Canaday ’06 collection of Pre-Columbian ceramics and Peruvian textiles; and pieces collected in Oceania by retired anthropology professor Dr. Jane Goodale.

African Collection

One of the highlights of the anthropology collection is the African collection, which has grown rapidly since 1990, when Bryn Mawr alumna Margaret Feurer Plass ’17 bequeathed to the college select pieces from her private collection. A world-renowned Africanist, Plass traveled and collected for forty years. A major addition to the collection during the 1990s was the donation of more than 270 African art objects by Mace Neufeld and Helen Katz Neufeld ’53. Bryn Mawr Professor of Anthropology Philip Kilbride has supplemented these collections with ethnographic objects he collected in East Africa in the 1960s.

Asian Art Collection

The Asian holdings include Helen B. Chapin’s (Class of 1925) collection of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scrolls, porcelains, lacquerware, terracottas, bronzes, and wood and stone artifacts. Also included in the Asian collection are imperial Japanese art and artifacts from the Elizabeth Gray Vining (Class of 1923) Collection, which she assembled while she was tutor to the Crown Prince (present Emperor) of Japan.

Special Collections, students, and living artists

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Guest writer Christina Lisk (Bryn Mawr 2014) is one of 15 student ambassadors participating in Docu-Commencement, a Bryn Mawr College Special Collections artist residency/exhibition project that began with four artists –Kay Healy, James Johnson, Jennifer Levonian, and Gilbert Plantinga – spending all or most of the weekend of Commencement 2012 on campus and will culminate in an exhibition that opens in late October. In August, Lisk attended and documented studio meetings with Healy and Levonian; she and other student ambassadors will continue to participate in the development of this project.

Kay Healy—A Closer Look

By Christina Lisk

I recently accompanied Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts Brian Wallace and Master’s candidate in the History of Art Amy Wojceichowski to meetings with Kay Healy and Jennifer Levonian, two of four artists developing new works as part of Docu-Commencement, a residency and exhibition project organized by Special Collections.

Kay Healy, Untitled (video still from work in progress), 2012, digital image, dimensions variable; courtesy the artist

Healy, who works out of a studio space in South Philadelphia, and who recently debuted a long-term installation artwork at the Philadelphia airport, focuses her work on textiles and printmaking.  The emphasis of her work is on the relationships between sociological differences, such as class, sexuality, and race, and individual memories. With these materials, and through these relationships, Healy ponders whether or not it is possible for one to truly return home. This question holds particular importance for Bryn Mawr, as many students call this campus “home” after their time in college ends. Healy and the other three Docu-Commencement artists spent 24 hours “in residence” during commencement weekend this past May; the artists are all developing new artworks to be shown on campus beginning in late October.

Healy intends to show her work in and outside of Canaday Library. While she is still pursuing a number of different possibilities, Healy is looking at installing an 8 foot wide replica of an orange couch she saw in Goodhart on Canaday’s walls. Televisions around campus may play a stop-action film of a similar orange couch being consumed by a garbage truck. Outside, silkscreened replicas of furniture will be placed on various buildings throughout campus. The decay of these replicas will be closely observed, and may have an appearance in both the exhibition and the daily lives of Bryn Mawr students.

Can a Bryn Mawr student really return home after graduation? Come answer that question through Healy’s work. For more information on Kay Healy and her projects, please see the images below or visit http://www.kayhealy.com

Jennifer Levonian—A Closer Look

By Christina Lisk

Have you ever seen another Bryn Mawr student and wondered “What is her story? What has happened to her during college?”  Jennifer Levonian, a Philadelphia-based painter and animation artist, explores this question in the intricate, detailed portrait of Bryn Mawr College she is in the midst of developing for Docu-Commencement, a Special Collections artist project. One of four artists participating in Bryn Mawr’s first artist residency/exhibition, Levonian examines campus culture through intricate paintings of dorms and students. Current Bryn Mawr women will recognize people and places from their “home” instantly. Those who are unfamiliar with Bryn Mawr’s most intimate settings will see obscure, yet significant elements of Bryn Mawr in Levonian’s work.

Jennifer Levonian, Untitled (digital still from work in progress), 2012, digital image, dimensions variable; courtesy the artist and Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia

 

Levonian is converting these paintings into a 5 to 7 minute video animation that tells linked stories about Kaitlin, a fictitious Bryn Mawr student. One of Kaitlin’s stories includes pushing through an academic year, a process illustrated with paintings named for Bryn Mawr College students’ final essays. Another tale from Kaitlin’s life includes her job at Wal-Mart, where she observes people paying with food stamps and discovers she is the only worker at her Wal-Mart who attends college. How does each story end? What stories does Bryn Mawr College have to tell? Come learn the answer through Levonian’s work.

A talk by Levonian and the other three artists will be held before the Docu-Commencement opening reception at Canaday Library on October 25th, 2012. For more information on Jennifer Levonian, please attend the upcoming artist’s talk and the exhibition, or, in the meantime, visit http://www.jenniferlevonian.com/.

 

Conversations with the Past: Francisco Amighetti’s ‘Susana’

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This post appears in conjunction with the exhibit Conversations: Selected Works from the Jacqueline Koldin Levine ‘46 and Howard Levine Collection (Class of 1912 Rare Book Room, Canaday Library, September 10 – October 14, 2012).

This blog was written by Maeve Doyle, graduate student in History of Art and co-curator of the Conversations exhibit.

An art historian is in many ways a detective. Works of art are rarely explicit about their origins or the intentions of their makers; it’s up to the art historian to reconstruct an object’s historical context. I’m sure I’m not alone in sometimes imagining my research as a criminal investigation when I’m hot on the heels of an elusive document or picture. But one doesn’t need the comparison to a Sherlock Holmes adventure to heighten the sense of triumph at the moment of discovery.

In planning Conversations, the exhibition showcasing the Jacqueline Koldin Levine ’46 and Howard Levine Collection, we in Special Collections had a lot of detective work ahead of us in order to find out more about these newly acquired works. One of the most striking works in the collection – by Costa Rican artist Francisco Amighetti – offered me a juicy clue as to how to understand it. The image shows a naked woman restrained within the clutches of three grotesque, lecherous figures, and the pencil inscription beneath the wood engraving print titles the work “Susana”.

Francisco Amighetti, Susana
Wood engraving, 1986
Bryn Mawr College Special Collections 2012.27.441

The image alone presents a nightmarish scene, its reality stripped to the colors of black, white, and red, the space reduced to a spare landscape at the last moments of sunset, and its figures overrun by the driving forces of sexual desire and fear. The inscription of the name “Susana” adds another layer to this dark fantasy by connecting it to a narrative – that is, the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders.

The story of Susanna is told in Chapter 13 of the Book of Daniel, a chapter now considered apocryphal (one reason why Susanna is less familiar to readers today). Because Daniel 13 isn’t in any modern bible, I looked to an older edition – from the 17th century – to reacquaint myself with Susanna’s story. As I did, I was surprised to find something closer to a modern cop or courtroom drama than the salacious violence of Amighetti’s print. The dramatic moment of the biblical story is not the city elders’ attempt to rape pious Susanna, but her subsequent trial, at which she calls on God to defend her from their false accusations of adultery. God inspires a man in the crowd, Daniel, to come to Susanna’s defense. In a classic cop-show twist, Daniel questions the elders separately and traps them in a lie, exposing their guilt and Susanna’s blamelessness. The people of Babylon stone the elders to death and everyone else lives happily ever after.

Amighetti, however, shifts the focus in the story to the moment of the elders’ threat against Susanna. The two surprise her while she is bathing alone in her husband’s garden and threaten her with a choice: either submit to their sexual demands, or face death under a false accusation of adultery. Passages from Amighetti’s print illustrate the assault on Susanna’s safety and privacy vividly: the single, bulging eye of the attacker on the lower left, or the contrast of the attacker’s black-red hand against Susanna’s white skin.

      
Francisco Amighetti, Susana, details
Wood engraving, 1986
Bryn Mawr College Special Collections 2012.27.441

Amighetti is not alone in this decision; in fact, it is the moment of Susanna’s confrontation with the elders – not her trial or their punishment – that is most often depicted in artistic representations of the story. In fact, the popularity of Susanna in the 16th and 17th centuries appears to have less to do with the moral dimensions of her story, and more to do with the opportunity to showcase the nude female form in painting. Indeed, the Susannas of Tintoretto and Peter Paul Rubens show little resistance to the elders’ invasion of the orchard: almost uniformly, these artists transform a scene of attempted violation into a representation of female sexual availability. (The striking exceptions are the Susannas of Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the rare female artists of the 17th century.)

While Renaissance artists transformed the biblical Susanna into an object for male voyeurism, Amighetti takes his representation one step further. He looks to representations from classical mythology of the rape of mortal women, often by supernatural men: Zeus carried Europa and Io away to serve his pleasure; Paris eloped with Helen with little thought to the consequences for Troy; Eros awakened the young Psyche to the world of sensual love and marriage. In art from the 16th through the 19th centuries, these scenes of kidnapping and rape were almost always refigured as an erotic experience for the always-willing woman. A print in Bryn Mawr’s collection, made after a painting by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, is a classic example of the genre, and it is easy to compare the poses of Amighetti’s Susanna and Prud’hon’s Psyche as she is carried away by the god of love’s cherubic accomplices.

Henri Charles Müller, The Rape of Psyche
Engraving, after a painting by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, 1st half of the 19th century
Bryn Mawr College Special Collections VP.279

In Amighetti’s print, however, the angelic assembly is replaced by a host of grotesque, lecherous attackers. And despite the similarities in Psyche’s and Susanna’s postures, Susanna’s response is ambiguous. With her eyes half closed and her arms pinned behind her back, it is unclear whether she is overcome by ecstasy or terror – and whether Amighetti is participating in the same visual traditions that characterize representations of Susanna, or if he is reacting against them. I still have a lot of questions about Susana – but this is where art history differs from detective work. Where Sherlock Holmes prides himself on having an answer to any question still remaining at the end of a tale, I always hope that the answers I find will raise even more questions.

PA Now Papers at Bryn Mawr College

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The Library has a strong collection of items relating to women’s studies and women’s history. A donation from the Pennsylvania branch of the National Organization for Women (PA NOW) this spring doubled our preexisting collection of papers from the group. The earlier donation covered the 1970s through mid-1980s, while the new addition brings the collection up to 2007.

The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966 and is the largest feminist organization in America. Core issues that the group has been active in include abortion/reproductive rights, violence against women, and ending racism and sexism. PA NOW was founded in 1971, and the earliest dated materials in the collection date back to the very beginning.

The PA NOW papers consist of materials saved in the office files of the organization: articles, pamphlets, newsletters, meeting transcripts, convention planning documents, records of the political action committee, and publications from groups other than PA NOW, both for and against various issues.  The collection is substantial, occupying over 15 feet of shelving, and covering a very wide range of topics in addition to the major issues: information on legislators, pornography, disability, aging, child welfare, family medical leave, inequities in health insurance, body image, sexual assault/ abuse, violence against women, equal pay – issues that affect the lives of all women.

The bulk of the collection consists of internal administrative documents. The organization tended to focus on one key issue at a time. The organization’s support for the Equal Rights Amendment during the early 1970s is reflected in the quantity of materials dedicated to the issue. Abortion was a major issue for PA NOW in the 1980s. The papers provide many pro-choice arguments, support the right to abortion under both usual and unusual circumstances, and debate the rights of spouses, partners, family members, and the community to prevent abortions.

Office documents covered state and political news, updates from other women’s organizations, and information about women’s conferences held in other countries, such as China. Legal documents from the Philadelphia region listing PA NOW as amicus curiae demonstrate the organization’s activity and role as an authority on women’s rights in the local area.

The collection also contains a small amount of ephemera, including T-shirts, buttons, and posters, the majority of which focus on LGBT issues, abortion, and racism.

A guide to the collection will soon be publicly available.

More information about PA NOW can be found at: http://www.panow.org/pages/keyissues.htm

Heather Davies is one of two Friends of the Library Undergraduate Interns.

Current Student Projects: Friends of the Library Summer Undergraduate Intern Hyoungee Kong

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It has been three weeks since the Levine Collection arrived at Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. This generous gift from Jacqueline and Howard Levine has been cause for great excitement among all the members of the Collection department, especially those who, like me have been fortunate enough to work directly with the newly arrived pieces of art. While delving into the trove of artworks and helping to organize and catalog them, I have had priceless experiences that have encouraged and catalyzed my passion in art history.
The Levines’ art collection consists hundreds of prints, thus providing me with the rare opportunity to study numerous prints in minute detail. As for my art historical training, I have been exposed to and focused on paintings and sculptures; there simply weren’t that many opportunities to concentrate on studying prints. In the process of cataloguing the Levine Collection, however, I could scrutinize many prints and thus absorb technical and historical knowledge that I was hardly aware I was lacking, and I could acquire theoretical knowledge through practical experience. Every day was as if I was visiting an artist’s studio.

Andre Derain
(Chatou, France, 1880-1954, Garches, France)
L’Enfant
Color Woodcut
11 1/4 in. x 8 3/4 in.
Gift of Jacqueline Koldin Levine ’46 and Howard H. Levine

 

This fortune to study prints closely also provided a discovery of new aspects of the artists whom I thought I knew well. Last week, I came across two prints by André Derain, a French Fauve I studied last spring in Paris. His works that I had seen were all paintings with fierce, vivid colors. However, his prints that I found in the Levine Collection showed hardly any of his well-known Fauve characteristics. This discovery of new facet of Derain’s art let me observe the artist anew and have a better sense of how his art had developed.
The intimate contact with each work of art is another gift I was given from the Levine Collection. Physical proximity to the artworks made my experiences with them profoundly personal; by handling and assessing a piece of art closely, I have an individual and lively conversation with it. Each encounter with a piece of art becomes unique due to this direct contact, and thus creates an intimate connection between me and the work. This is, without exception, a very emotionally powerful event.
The Levine Collection has provided me with a precious opportunity to learn about and to communicate with art. This good fortune has been a catalyst for my passion in what I have been studying and will be a great encouragement to continue my journey to become an art history scholar. I truly thank Jackie and Howard Levine, who made this wonderful gift to the Special Collections. I would also like to thank Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager for Art and Artifacts in Special Collections, and Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts of Bryn Mawr College, who have helped me discover and further appreciate the treasures of this donation.

The Levine Collection Has Arrived!

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This blog post was created by Maeve Doyle, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

This past Tuesday was no ordinary workday in Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. By 10 in the morning, our seminar room in Canaday Library was overflowing with boxes and large bins containing the first shipment of the Jacqueline and Howard Levine Collection. If you’re walking past Canaday 205, be sure to stop and enjoy the sight of us squeezing through wall-to-wall crates of art!

Hyoungee dives in

This new wealth of works on paper is due to the generous gift of Jacqueline and Howard Levine. Jacqueline Koldin Levine, class of 1946, has long been an active member of the Bryn Mawr community, serving on the Board of Trustees from 1979 to 1991. The Levines’ art collection focuses mainly on prints and contains a wide range of examples of European modernism as well as a particular emphasis on American Social Realist movements, such as the Ashcan School. We are tremendously grateful to Jackie and Howard Levine; their donation of this superlative collection will allow Bryn Mawr students to discover, study, and enjoy its works for generations.

Howard Levine & Brian Wallace, Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts, in the Levines’ home gallery, before the collection’s move

Before that can happen, however, we need to integrate these new pieces into our existing collections. That’s down to Hyoungee Kong and me: two students , twenty-two boxes and bins, and 482 works of art (so far!). Our first step is to assign a Bryn Mawr accession number to each object and to make a concordance between the Levine catalogue numbers and the new identifiers. Next we’ll be moving the works out of their temporary boxes and bins and into the archival folders and boxes that will be their permanent homes. While we do this, our eyes will be peeled for the best exemplars of the Levine Collection, which we’ll showcase in an exhibit next year. Our last step will be to catalogue each new addition and to make images and information about the artworks available on the Tri-College TriArte Art and Artifacts Database. We’ve been working closely with Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager, Art and Artifact Collections in Special Collection to complete this mammoth task.

Maeve starts the inventory for a new box; you never know what you’ll find!

As we pull works one by one from their boxes, we’ve come face-to-face with the works of master printmakers of the 20th century and earlier. From the artistic avant-garde of Pablo Picasso or George Grosz to the social commentary of Käthe Kollwitz or the Social Realist artists of the 1920s and 30s, the images are startling, challenging, touching, and beautiful. This is a collection with emotional as well as artistic range. Here is just a taste of what’s to be discovered in the Levine Collection …

Francisco de Goya, Tanto y Mas, 1810, 2012.27.241

Pablo Picasso, Nude (constructed title), 2012.27.457

Moshe Gat, Old Man in a Doorway (constructed title), 2012.27.432