Bryn Mawr College’s Madonna and Child, by Romare Bearden, on Exhibit in New York

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Today, February 15, 2013, Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery Opens at the Museum of Biblical Art.  One of the paintings in the exhibition, Madonna and Child by Romare Bearden (above), is on loan from Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.  The exhibition will be open until May 26, 2013 at MOBiA and then it will travel to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture June 22 – September 29, 2013; and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens October 20, 2013 – January 5, 2014.

More information on the exhibition can be found at: http://mobia.org/exhibitions/ashe-to-amen#slideshow1

More information about Madonna and Child by Romare Bearden can be found at: http://triarte.brynmawr.edu/Obj164044

Joseph W. Taylor’s Books – From the Library of our Founder

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Four of Dr. Taylor's booksBryn Mawr’s Special Collections  holds a number of books previously owned by Dr. Joseph W. Taylor, the founder of the college. In a recent reexamination of some of these—in my case, a first viewing—we were excited to find a group of four books which illuminate the background of Dr. Taylor’s personal education and his beliefs on the place of women in American society. Taylor carefully signed and dated each of his books, which allows us to attach them to known periods of his life. Three are dated to the mid-1820s, when he was in his early teenage years.[i] His age, coupled with the subjects of these books (Euclidean geometry and Latin commentaries on the works of Julius Caesar and Ovid), suggest that these may have been his own schoolbooks. If this is so, their content shows his early education to have been erudite and classically-focused.

The fourth book, Woman, Her Station Providentially Appointed…, by Margaret Coxe, discusses the role of women in American society in general and, more pointedly, argues for women’s intellectual aptitude and the importance of women as teachers.[ii] It came into Dr. Taylor’s collection while living in the Philadelphia area in 1853, one year before he became a member of the Board of Haverford College. It is attractive to imagine this book as one of many which spurred Dr. Taylor’s dream of a women’s college whose academic standards equaled those of institutions like those where he had.

Together, these books serve as a reflection of a man who was well-educated from a young age; a man who valued his school books, and by extension education, enough to keep them throughout his life; and a man who as a rising professional took an interest in questions of the social and intellectual life of American women. Luckily they stayed together in order to support this portrait. What kept them together and how did they come into our collections?

After Taylor’s death in 1880, the books stayed in the Taylor family, passing to Joseph’s sister, thence to her children, and finally to Margaret Taylor MacIntosh. Margaret was a Bryn Mawr alumna (Class of ’21) and took a keen interest in her great uncle—she wrote and published his biography in 1932.[iii] It is no wonder that she realized that these heirlooms would be treasured by Bryn Mawr as they had been by Taylor’s family. She donated many of the volumes to the library in 1955, but some, including that on women’s place in society—in a pleasantly decorative, but subdued, early-Victorian binding—only came to us in 1965. Although the books each have their own distinct origin and history, their individual stories very quickly coincide; they remained together in in the Thomas family libraries until they came into our possession. Here in Special Collections we can preserve not only their individual content, but also their constellation, offering us tantalizing insights into the background and character of the man who collected them—and who founded Bryn Mawr College.

[i] Aulus Hirtius, Jean Godouin, and Thomas Clark, ed. 1824. C. Julii Cæsaris, quæ extant. Philadelphia: J. Grigg. (http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/find/Record/.b3895809); Playfair, John ed.. 1819. Elements of geometry: containing the first six books of Euclid : with a supplement on the quadrature of the circle, and the geometry of solids : to which are added elements of plane and spherical trigonometry. New York: Collins and Hanny. (http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/find/Record/.b3895808); Jan Minell, and Nathan Bailey ed. 1815. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in fifteen books. Dublin: printed by Brett Smith. (http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/find/Record/.b3895805)

[ii] Coxe, Margaret. 1848. Woman, her station providentially appointed: and the duties assigned to a woman in her station. Columbus [Ohio]: Isaac N. Whiting. (http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/find/Record/.b3895810)

[iii] MacIntosh, Margaret Taylor. 1936. Joseph Wright Taylor, founder of Bryn Mawr College. Haverford, Pa: C.S. Taylor. (http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/find/Record/.b1450995)

 

TriArte – What do YOU want to see?

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We are in the process of preparing to remove the IP restrictions from TriArte which will allow people outside of the tri-college community access to our Art and Artifacts Database. As part of this process we are evaluating what information should be displayed.  Currently we display information such as: Artist, Artist Life Dates, Creation Date, Period/Era/Dynasty, Title, Geographic Region of Origin, Donor, BMC Accession Number, Classification, Keywords and Images.

Is the information we are displaying useful to you?  Below is a sample, a screen-shot of P.89 an Attic Black-Figure Neck-Amphora (Storage Vessel) as currently displayed in TriArte.

We’d like to hear from you.  What additional information would you like to see?  We have been considering adding the following information:

  • Publications citing the object
  • Exhibitions containing the object
  • Description of the object: for example the description for P.89 an Attic Black-Figure Neck-Amphora (Storage Vessel) could be: This amphora’s shoulders are painted with a pair of eyes with eyebrows, framed by standing male figures holding spears. The decoration is completed by the painted nose and the handles, which were called “ears” in ancient Greek. The amphora is a striking example of the Greek tendency to anthropomorphize pottery; by the Late Archaic period, the eye motif was quite common on drinking cups. When the eye motif is found on amphorae, it may suggest that they, too, were used in a symposium setting. This vase belongs to a small group of amphorae with similar decoration by a painter in the circle of the Antimenes Painter, one of the major vase-painters of his time.
  • Location for the object if currently on public view
  • Related web resources such as the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Video on Making Greek Vases:  http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/videoDetails?segid=373.

Robert Darnton to speak at Bryn Mawr on Digital Libraries

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Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard University and one of the preeminent scholars on France in the  eighteenth century will speak at Bryn Mawr College Thursday, November 8th at 7:30 pm in the Thomas Great Hall.   The title of his lecture is Digitize, Democratize: Libraries and the Future of Books.

His articles on ebooks and the proposed Digital Public Library of America in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and other publications in recent years have made him one of the the most influential and widely read figures on the future of books, scholarship, and academic libraries.  Links to several of his major articles on digital libraries are at the end of this post.

Robert Darnton taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007, when he became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard.  He has served as a trustee of the New York Public Library and  as president of the American Historical Association.  Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal conferred by President Obama in February 2012.  He has been a member of the Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee since its founding in 2010.

He has written and edited many books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France.  His latest books are The Case for Books (2009), The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (2010), and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010).

His lecture at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Libraries.  The event is free and open to the public.  For information, call 610-526-6576 or email SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.

Below are links to Robert Darnton’s major articles on digital libraries:

Jefferson’s Taper: a National Digital Library, New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011

Google’s Loss, the Public’s Gain New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011

The Library: Three Jeremiads  New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010

Can We Create a National Digital Library?  New York Review of Books, October 28, 2010

Google and the New Digital Future  New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009

Google and the Future of Books  New York Review of Books, February 12, 2009

The Library in the New Age  New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008

 

 

 

“Furness in Space”

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"Red Leaf" (Henszey residence, Ardmore, PA, Furness and Evans, 1881), in Wells and Hope, A Survey of Philadelphia Suburban Homes, 1889. Image courtesy the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Special Collections is hosting three new exhibitions this fall: we’ll be posting on all three of them over the next two weeks. One show, “Furness in Space,” organized by Professor Jeffrey Cohen (Growth & Structure of Cities) and his students, is being installed in Canaday Library lobby this week.

Professor Cohen, who, along with scholars, architectural historians, and preservation activists, has pushed for the documentation and preservation of endangered and little-understood suburban Furness homes, recently summarized the approach he and his students took to the exhibition, which is on view through the end of the semester:

“In his designs for houses outside the city, Frank Furness (1839-1912) found himself in a venue and moment of almost untrammeled possibilities. Old architectural formulations projecting social prominence had been cast off by a heady new generation of architects who seized center stage in the decades after the Civil War, and they set about creating new ones. They were called upon by a host of new men of substantial means, many of them successful entrepreneurs who sought to celebrate their individuality and licensed their architects to devise forms of distinction for them. Few were as well suited to such a task as Frank Furness.

“This exhibition represents the work of students in classes in the Growth & Structure of Cities Department, along with several collaborators, who explored Furness’s country and suburban houses with a special eye to new architectural imageries and to patterns of spatial disposition in such works. It also seeks to situate his designs in dialogue with those of his contemporaries, helping us reimagine the contingency of this episode of architectural ferment in the 1870s and 1880s.”

Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the late 19th-century Country House
Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, 14 October – 21 December 2012

Bryn Mawr College’s Single Leaf Manuscripts Collection and The Last Will and Testament of Finas de Sancto Cirico

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Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections holds nearly two hundred manuscripts written on single leaves of parchment, paper, or papyrus. Many of these leaves are merely a portion of a whole work from which they were separated at an earlier time. Others are complete documents. We are excited to announce that our effort to add the Single Leaf Manuscripts Collection to our online database is now nearly complete. Previously, records of our manuscripts existed only on paper, making it difficult for scholars and researchers to access the unique information contained in each manuscript. Now, scholars and researchers can search for manuscripts and view information about each document or text online. What is more, we have created high-quality digital images of these manuscripts to allow them to be viewed online and ensure their survival in the event that they deteriorate further or are destroyed by the malice of time. The database will be made public next week.

The Single Leaf Manuscripts Collection consists of diverse manuscript leaves in a variety of languages. They were given to the library by a number of generous donors including Sigmund Harrison, Felix Usis, Howard Lehman Goodhart, Phyllis Goodhart Gordan, Doreen Canaday Spitzer, and Miriam Coffin Canady. Most of the manuscripts are medieval (1100-1500 CE), originated in Europe, and concern religious or legal subjects. But the collection also contains Greek, Arabic, and Coptic papyrus fragments, some of which may date to as early as the first and second century CE, and French, English, and American documents that date from the sixteenth to the twentieth century CE.

The Single Leaf Manuscripts Collection features papal bulls sealed by Popes Clement VII, Sixtus V, Innocent XI, and Innocent XII; a legal document with the seal of Queen Elizabeth I and another with the seal of King Edward VII; two letters, one signed by King Henry IV of France and the other by King Philip III of Spain; and grants of nobility sealed by Holy Roman Emperors Leopold II and Francis II. The documents in the collection associated with well-known historical figures are certainly special. Perhaps more extraordinary, however, are documents connected with unknown individuals, because documents relating to these people may well not exist anywhere else in the world.

Single Leaf Manuscripts Collection (2012.11.71). Will of Finas de Sancto Cirico. Parchment. Gothic bastard hand in brown ink. Penwork notarial seal at the bottom. Verso is blank. Approximately 12×12 in.

The last will and testament of Finas de Sancto Cirico, the daughter of Guillelmus de Sancto Cirico, is a good example. Finas de Sancto Cirico was a woman who lived in a time very distant from our own, yet one feels a connection with her while reading her will. The will was penned by a cleric (Latin: clericus) of the Diocese of Cahors in France on the 24th of October in 1288 CE, but is written in the first person voice of Finas. Her testament reveals her religious piety and provides instructions for the disbursement of her property to the church and her heirs, including her son, Arnaldus Bonafos, and her brothers. She entrusts her body and soul “to our lord Jesus Christ, his most glorious mother, and all of the heavens” and her body “to a grave in the cemetery of Sancte Sperie.” At the bottom of the will, the cleric who wrote down the will added a note with his penwork seal affirming that he “faithfully wrote down the words spoken by Finas de Sancto Cirico while in her presence.” In Finas’ own words, she wishes her final arrangements to be recorded for public memory at the present moment “because nothing is more certain than death, and nothing is more uncertain than the hour of death” (Quia nichil cercius morte, et nichil incercius hora morti).

Jennifer Kay Hoit
Greek, Latin & Classical Studies

 

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.