Exhibits | c u r i o

Inside the Lost Museum

July 17, 2014 by rness | Comments Off on Inside the Lost Museum

Detail of an interior view of Brown University’s Museum of Natural History, c.1871-1894

This year, visitors to the Brown University campus have the opportunity to visit a museum that no longer exists; a museum that was systematically dismantled when the cabinet of curiosities approach to the display of natural history fell out of vogue, and after its founder, John Whipple Potter Jenks (1819-1894), dropped dead on the building’s steps. In 1891, the museum was viewed as a “showpiece of the University,” [1. Wilson, J. Walter, The Jenks Museum at Brown University. Books at Brown, Vol. XXII, 1968; Brown University Library, p.41] but this sentiment would not last. In his 1905 plea for University funds to support the museum, Professor Albert D. Mead, added that “the reasonableness of spending money for the dusting and rearranging of the miscellaneous curios of a university junk shop for the gratification of a few straggling sightseers is, we readily admit, not obvious.” [2. Ibid, p.54] Over time, the orphaned objects of the museum were scattered and forgotten; the majority of the collection was eventually discarded in the University’s dump by the Seekonk River.

John Whipple Potter Jenks

Today, the Jenks Museum of Natural History and Anthropology (1871-1894) has been resurrected and re-imagined by “The Jenks Society for Lost Museums,” a group comprised of students from the Center for Public Humanities at Brown, students from RISD, faculty advisors, and the artist Mark Dion. During the spring semester, the society tracked down remaining fragments of the original collection, re-envisioned Professor Jenks’s office, commissioned art objects based on lost artifacts, and installed the exhibit at the museum’s original home in Rhode Island Hall. At the project’s core sit questions about the permanence, or rather impermanence, of collecting and preservation.

Photographic evidence of the museum, as it was, can be found in the Brown University Archives. The Images of Brown collection holds seven interior views of the museum’s floor-to-ceiling displays, offering a window inside its eclectic space. The detailed image viewer allows for zooming in on a plethora of zoological specimens. The collection also includes a carte de visite of Jenks himself, taken in Florida where the naturalist collected many artifacts for the museum at Brown.

The Lost Museum will be on display in Rhode Island Hall (Brown University, 60 George Street, Providence, Rhode Island) through May 2015.

Images of the Great War

June 12, 2014 by rness | Comments Off on Images of the Great War

Over 25,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection have been digitized and added to the Brown Digital Repository, a portion of which feature World War I subject matter. Events surrounding the centennial of World War I (1914-1919) mean that some of this artwork will be displayed in public exhibitions. In April, an exhibit titled “Images of the Great War: The European Offensives – 1914-1916, World War I Prints and Drawings from the Anne S.K. Brown University Library” opened at the President Woodrow Wilson House in Washington D.C. The exhibit presents multiple perspectives on the war, and was co-curated by Peter Harrington, curator of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, and Stephanie Daugherty, curator at the President Woodrow Wilson House. Peter Harrington feels that the significance of the thirty-five prints and drawings on exhibit is that “they offer an interesting contrast between those produced for the home front, often for commercial purposes, and the images created by the soldiers themselves.” Among the prints created for commercial purposes is this colored plate after the Dutch propaganda cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, depicting three French infantrymen guarded by a German soldier. The image was published in London for the British Weekly “Land and Water” and can be viewed in The “Land & Water” edition of Raemaekers’ cartoons.

Read more about the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection prints highlighted in the exhibit (on view through August, 2014) here and on the Brown University Library News blog.

French Prisoners of War, c. 1914-1915, by Louis Raemakers.

French Prisoners of War, c. 1914-1915. Louis Raemaekers.

Porcelain Figures from Brown’s Monuments Man

February 7, 2014 by btylr | 7 Comments

Porcelain figures originally commissioned by John Nicholas Brown II (1900–1979) are currently on exhibit at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. library through April 25, 2014. Brown II was a civilian-status Lieutenant Colonel, Special Cultural Advisor for Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) in Europe toward the end of World War II — as well as husband to collector Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown, the founder of the Library’s military art collection (a substantial part of which has been digitized for online viewing). While the 21 porcelains currently on display in the library were not salvaged works per se, they were commissioned by Brown in 1945 while he was a “monuments man” in Europe.

Thanks to a movie opening on February 7, 2014, directed by George Clooney and loosely based on historical accounts, the “monuments men” have been making a resurgence in both popular media and the cultural heritage community: from features in the New York Times (re: monuments women, as well), to educational reference resources showcasing the retrieved artworks (Scholars Resource set featuring 111 salvaged works), to recent commentaries by associated museums (“In the Footsteps of the Monuments Men: Traces from the Archives at the Metropolitan Museum”).

The image shown below, a porcelain commissioned by John Nicholas Brown II in late 1945 while serving with MFAA, was taken by Digital Production Services for the library’s exhibition publicity. Curator Peter Harrington describes the context of its commission:

While John Nicholas Brown was working with the allied forces in Germany in 1945 reporting on stolen art works, he visited the factory at Nymphenburg in Bavaria and ordered 21 porcelain figures for his wife, Anne S. K. Brown. Subsequent additions to this set came from the Dresden porcelain factory. Today these porcelains form a unique segment of the foremost American collection devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering.

Interpreting Flatland

October 25, 2013 by btylr | 1 Comment

“Instructions” for reading the 1980 Arion Press edition of Flatland, atop aluminum covers and frame.

This semester the Library will commemorate the mathematical-philosophical novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) by Edwin Abbott (1838–1926). 2013 marks the 175th anniversary of Abbott’s birth, and 2014 will be the 130th anniversary of Flatland‘s 1884 publication. The exhibition “Flatland Worldwide and Edwin A. Abbott at 75 (+100)” opens in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. library on November 1, 2013; Brown professor Thomas Banchoff, mathematician and Abbott scholar, will present a related talk on Wednesday, November 13 (at 5:30 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab).

In 2005 the Library captured a rare 1980 Arion Press edition of Flatland, limited to 275 copies, featuring aluminum covers, accordion-style page binding, and illustrations designed to integrate creatively with the text. As described by the Press, this custom edition aimed to formally accentuate elements of the content:

…Andrew Hoyem‘s radical design and illustrations realize many implications of the book, such as: the “volume” can be opened out flat to form a thirty-foot plane; the plane-geometrical citizens of Flatland are infinitely thin (holes in paper); they cast shadows; their edges glow.…

Shown below are some sample spreads from the book. Stop by the exhibit to view the original.

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Weaving Lives, Scanning Slides

February 18, 2013 by Jacquelyn Harris | 5 Comments

Santa Maria, Guatemala

Girl weaving on backstrap loom
San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Sacatepéquez, Guatemala

Picturesque landscapes, village life, and intricate hand-woven textiles are predominant features of the Margot Blum Schevill Collection recently donated to the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. Schevill began collecting during her many trips to Guatemala as an anthropology graduate student in the 1970s. Her efforts culminated in a collection of over 200 textile pieces, thousands of images, and boxes of correspondence that represent her study of and appreciation for Guatemalan weaving practices, the symbolism of the vivid colors and patterns, and the cultural significance of traditional dress or traje.

In addition to being a graduate student in the Public Humanities Program here at Brown, I also work as a student employee scanning archival materials for Digital Production Services. Two of my peers at the Brown Center for Public Humanities, Anna Ghublikian and Maria Quintero, have been cataloging the Schevill collection for over a year now. Last year, Anna and Maria’s work aligned with an undergraduate student project that partnered with a Maya-Guatemalan weaving collective in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts. The weavers in the collective – called Oxib’ B’atz (Three Threads in the K’iche language) – use traditional back-strap looms to weave textiles like those in Schevill collection. These traditional weaving practices not only produce beautiful works, they also help the Maya community retain aspects of its cultural identity in its new home in New Bedford.

This fall, Maria and Anna proposed an expansion of the initial project, which would display Oxib’ B’atz works with pieces from the Schevill collection. Their proposal, taken on as a student project and supported by much collaboration, has resulted in a temporary installation currently on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The exhibit Weaving Stories, Weaving Lives: Maya Textiles from Guatemala and New Bedford displays pieces of masterful weaving alongside images from the Schevill collection. On Saturday, March 2nd, at 2:00 p.m., visitors to the museum will be able to see a demonstration by local Maya weavers using the back-strap loom to create beautiful textiles. Additional museum programming includes Maya textile-related crafts and children’s activities during School Vacation Week, and other programs through April 7.

Santa Maria, Guatemala

In my role as a Public Humanities student, I have been working with the exhibit team to write guide text and assist with publicity. Meanwhile, in my position as a scanning assistant, I have been scanning hundreds of slides from the Schevill Collection. This collection, once fully digitized and cataloged, will be available through the Haffenreffer Museum, as well as ingested into the Brown Digital Repository. Slide scanning has been a departure from the typical flatbed scanning I had been performing. I learned the nuances of cleaning the slides with a static-free cloth and compressed air, how to orient the slides in the automatic slide feeder, and how to make use of Nikon SuperCoolScan5000 settings to save the files with identifying accession numbers. My hands-on experience with the slides has given me greater appreciation for the “Weaving Stories, Weaving Lives” project, and enough familiarity with the collection to help select some of the images I scanned for the exhibition, which I also helped to install before the official opening on March 2.

Further information on Margot Schevill’s work with ethnographic costume and textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America can be found in the electronic copy of her book Costume as Communication.

– Jacquelyn Harris ‘13

detail of textile created in San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

c u r i o

Imaging rare, unusual, and intriguing objects at the Brown University Library

Category Archives: Exhibits

Inside the Lost Museum

Images of the Great War

Porcelain Figures from Brown’s Monuments Man

Interpreting Flatland

Weaving Lives, Scanning Slides