From the October, 1942 WQXR Program Guide:

We asked Mrs. Lytle Hull to write this because she is in close touch with efforts to bring more and better music to the public. She is the Director of the Philharmonic Symphony Society, the President of the New Opera Company, and the Acting President of the Musicians Emergency Fund.

In wars of the past, and even in the first World War — though to a lesser degree– music was used successfully to arouse the emotions and stimulate the courage and daring of the fighting man. The warrior of old marched off to war, and often advanced into battle, with the strains of martial music inspiring him to deeds of valor. Today the soldier fights to the deafening roar of mechanical implements of destruction –and the crash and turmoil of artillery and machine gun fire provide the motif.

In those other and possibly more romantic days, wars were fought by professional and semi-professional armies, and not often in history were entire populations involved. Today’s great human maelstrom, on the other hand, is a war of whole peoples in which the stamina and morale of those behind the lines is as essential to success as is the sturdiness of the actual combatants. It is for this reason that those who control the destinies of the warring nations are providing governmental assistance for the dissemination of ever better and ever more music among the people.

Up until now, it would appear that the governments of England, Russia, China and Germany realize more than does our own the importance of the medium of music in building public morale. For the first time since the reign of the Tudors, four hundred years ago, the British Government has organized and subsidized a department of music–The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. This bureau sends symphony orchestras to perform in even the most remote districts of the British Isles. The Government also provides musical entertainment for factories during lunch hours, rest periods and night shifts. The London Philharmonic Orchestra gives daily performances; and the thrilling story of the “Myra Hess Concerts” — held daily at noon in the National Gallery during the terrible bombing raids of 1941, and always filled to capacity–is well known. The Old Sadler’s Wells Opera Company has created two additional companies in order to satisfy the rapidly increasing appetite for music in a race of people not heretofore considered particularly musical.

The Russian Government provides music both for its soldiers at the battlefront and for its workers on the production front. Ballet, opera and symphony concerts were “jammed to the rafters” all last winter–with the temperature sometimes thirty degrees below zero and the armies of Germany in the not-great-distance.

The Government of Chiang Kai-shek has recognized the value of music as a paramount builder and sustainer of public morale. During the past five harrowing years of warfare this Government has organized the Chinese Philharmonic Orchestra, the Experimental School of Dramatic Arts Orchestra, and the National Conservatory Orchestra and sends them constantly to those districts where the stimulation of the populace appears desirable.

Germany, always teeming with music, has, from reports, made it a “must” wherever men and women work, and where soldiers gather.

We alone hold back, except for a start which is being made by civilian defense organizations in some localities, perhaps because we are still far away from the constant danger of sudden death, and, paradoxically, need no sedative to quiet our nerves. Some day, let us hope in the not too distant future, our Government will see fit to subsidize the big symphony orchestras and opera companies in this country. In these days of heavy taxation and patriotic calls upon the purses of all, it is difficult for a few public-spirited people to sustain the great organizations like the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. Yet such institutions are essential to our standards of life and they should be maintained by the music-loving public, aided by the City, State or Federal Government.

Of course the radio in this country is helping morale through music, and there is little need to tell WQXR listeners how much that station is contributing to wartime morale by broadcasting more good music than any other station in the United States.

The New Opera Company, organized last year and about to embark on its second season, filled a long recognized vacancy in the musical life of New York City. Intimate opera at moderate prices, performed by young Americans, found a ready and enthusiastic reception. These three above mentioned organizations and others similar to them throughout the country will mean increasingly more to the public as the war continues and as we daily become more conscious of the changes being brought about in the lives of us all.

The blood of many nationalities flows through the lifestream of America, and this fact doubtless accounts for the love of music which is so universal in our nation. One has but to be present at a few Carnegie Hall concerts and observe the rapt expressions and motionless concentration of the many men in uniform, who represent a complete cross-section of the nation, to realize what music must mean to a large percentage of Americans. It makes a stirring plea to lovers of music to do all they can, financially and in other ways, to maintain and encourage our existing musical organizations: a real war job, and of vital importance at this time.

Music stimulates and soothes, inspires and comforts. It is the staff of life to thousands; relaxation and pleasure to hundreds of thousands; and a sustainer, perhaps unconsciously, of morale to millions.

__________________________

Poster released by Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. Bureau of Special Services.(1941-1945) National Archives.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnet V: XVI

Between March 15 and May 17, 1857, there were thirteen births recorded in Greenfield, Massachusetts. In the same two months, there were four maternal deaths from puerperal fever (or “childbed fever”), a highly contagious infection. Those were not good odds for a pregnant woman.¹

The third of those four deaths, on May 12, was that of Anna (formally Hannah) Tuckerman, beautiful and deeply beloved wife of poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821-1873). Anna was 29 and had already borne three children, one of whom had died shortly after birth, while the other two, Edward and Anna, were now, in 1857, children of 7 and 4 respectively. The fourth birth – that of her son Frederick – went well enough at first; that is, the child was born on May 7 and lived. But shortly after his birth, Anna began to suffer the effects of the infection. Letters in the archives from shocked relatives – her husband’s aunt, her sister- and brothers-in-law – reveal that she “suffered fifty convulsion fits & seemed to suffer intensely” and that her illness lasted five days. Her husband, who was probably with her all through the birth and subsequent illness, was “all but frantick [sic] with grief…” “What will poor Frederick do!” wrote his sister-in-law, Sarah Tuckerman, ” and those poor children too, left without a mother!  How short is life, how near is death to us.  I feel so sad that I can hardly write.”

Puerperal fever victims suffer from a bacterial infection “caused by organisms such as the Group A Streptococcus (GAS) bacteria which, if untreated, may lead to toxic shock syndrome, multi-organ failure and death.” The bacteria cause heavy fever as the infection spreads and the abdomen swells with peritonitis. There is usually intense pain: “the severity of the pain often increased to such intensity that there are many reports of patients who emitted a continuous cry of agony or alternatively were frozen in speechless terror by the severity of their pain.”² Occasionally the sufferer experienced a diminution of the pain that appeared to mean an improvement in the case, when in fact it meant that death was imminent.

I make these observations about Anna’s death because it was an event that affected her widower profoundly, and for the rest of his life. Of the poetry Frederick Tuckerman wrote after the event, much is suffused with his memory of Anna and his sense of loss.³ Her violent end haunted him, and it haunts those of his readers who know the story and can imagine that “one mild face, with suffering lined.”  He came by his grief honestly.

Anna and Frederick have been on my mind recently because in 2013 we received as gifts a small collection of images of the couple. A few of them have been published before, but in poor reproductions, and a few have never been published. Frederick’s birthday was in early February, so to mark the occasion here are the images.  Click on any image for a larger gallery view.

Frederick Tuckerman has often been referred to as a “forgotten” or “neglected” poet, and yet his work has been published in several volumes (beginning with his own privately published volume in 1860, reprinted thereafter) and reviewed many times.  He has been anthologized.  There is a biography.  Harvard owns most of his manuscripts.   Behold — he has a Wikipedia page.  He is not hard to find.  Perhaps it is time, then, that we cease to refer to him as “neglected” or “forgotten” — those words have the ring of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and of pathos.   The most recent publication of his work is in Ben Mazer’s wonderful volume “Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman” (2010), with its introduction by Professor Stephen Burt of Harvard.  Because I could not possibly say it better, and because I’m happy to plug the book, here are several quotes from Burt’s introduction about Tuckerman, with page numbers in parentheses afterward:

Tuckerman had a superb ear, a sense of the music in a pentameter line, rare in any country or century.  He had, too, a sensitive, and an unflinching attention to the psychology of mourning; and he made a strenuous and reflective attempt to reconcile his melancholy temperament with religious faith. (Introduction: x)

He showed his technique in a panoply of sonnets whose variety expanded the limits of the fourteen-line form.  He did so as a poet of New England, of its landscapes, its local history (“Wassahoale” and “sagamore George”), and especially its plant life: he became an American poet of natural history, the American poet who best records the failure of the nineteenth-century enterprise called natural theology. The Tuckerman of the sonnet series looks into himself, looks at the mullein’s golden stalks and at the ocean’s crests and troughs, looks for evidence of a just God there, and discovers – perhaps without ever having read Darwin – that such evidence is not to be found.  (x-xi)

Tuckerman became at once a student of grief and a student of botany, seeking at once leafy detail for its own sake (he always finds it) and evidence of God’s plan for us (which he does not find)… (xiii)

This poet of grief and of natural history is also our first dedicated American poet of the disenchanted, inhuman biosphere: as much as his rhetoric belongs to his era, as much as he does retain a Christian faith, he seems at times closer to Nature, the scientific journal, than to Wordsworth’s Nature (which ‘never did betray/The heart that loved her’)…  (xiii)

In Tuckerman’s best poems natural theology, the claim that we can know God through an ordered nature, becomes inseparable from a mourner’s theodicy, the attempt to get past personal loss by proving that God’s ways are after all just. (xv; for an example of “a mourner’s theodicy,” see note 4 below.)

The sonnet sequences begin by asking – they never stop asking – how to connect flora and fauna to human loss and human truth, and whether that connection can even be made. (xvii)

The gallery of images below includes several selections from Tuckerman’s work.  The poems are all from the Archives copy of his privately published edition of 1860.

Notes and selected links

(1) “Roughly speaking, there were, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about 2-3 deaths and 6-9 cases in every 1,000 deliveries. In epidemics, of course, there were far more.” Loudon, Irvine. The tragedy of childbed fever. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 6.

(2) Ibid, p. 7.

(3) In his biography of Frederick Tuckerman (“Beyond Romanticism,” 1990), Eugene England suggests that Frederick felt guilt over Anna’s death “perhaps for some failure to provide medical care” (p 120).  I believe there is no evidence for this idea beyond the “guilt” in his poems.  Anna would have had a midwife or doctor (either one probably the source of her infection) for a home birth, as was customary at the time.  Furthermore, the nature of puerperal fever was that once it struck, nothing could be done — there was no other effective “medical care” to provide.   Today a patient would get a course of antibiotics and most likely recover completely.

(4) As an example of “a mourner’s theodicy,” consider this excerpt from a letter about Anna’s death from Mary May, Frederick Tuckerman’s aunt, to Sarah Tuckerman, his sister-in-law: “These are sore trials.  There is nothing for us to say, when such come – but that the Giver has exercised his right, & we must submit.  –tis a hard lesson, & few attain it perfectly, few who sincerely say “thy will be done.” (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Cushing-Tuckerman-Esty Papers, letter of May 24, 1857; letters quoted earlier also from this collection)

******************************************************************************

Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard.  Poems (1864): http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011561943

Mazer, Ben.  Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/456169890

Loudon, Irvine.  The Tragedy of Childbed Fever: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41419618

England, Eugene.  Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman’s Life and Poetry: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/243706071

Hudgins, Andrew.  “‘A Monument of labor Lost’: The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman”: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25305477

Groves, Jeffrey.  “A Letter from Frederick Goddard Tuckerman to James T. Fields”: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817219

Golden, Samuel.  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/711989

Wilson, Edmund.  Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/207025

Bynner, Witter.  The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1482436

Winters, Yvor.  “A Discovery: The Cricket,  by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman”: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3847469

Eaton, Walter Pritchard.  “A Forgotten American Poet”: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26405/26405-h/26405-h.htm

Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard.  “The Cricket” (1950 Cummington Press version): http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4289505

–”The Cricket,” Massachusetts Review, Autumn, 1960, vol. 2, issue 1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25086599

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/frederick-goddard-tuckerman

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174269 (Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest”)

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnet V: XVI

Between March 15 and May 17, 1857, there were thirteen births recorded in Greenfield, Massachusetts. In the same two months, there were four maternal deaths from puerperal fever (or “childbed fever”), a highly contagious infection. Those were not good odds for a pregnant woman.¹

The third of those four deaths, on May 12, was that of Anna (formally Hannah) Tuckerman, beautiful and deeply beloved wife of poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821-1873). Anna was 29 and had already borne three children, one of whom had died shortly after birth, while the other two, Edward and Anna, were now, in 1857, children of 7 and 4 respectively. The fourth birth – that of her son Frederick – went well enough at first; that is, the child was born on May 7 and lived. But shortly after his birth, Anna began to suffer the effects of the infection. Letters in the archives from shocked relatives – her husband’s aunt, her sister- and brothers-in-law – reveal that she “suffered fifty convulsion fits & seemed to suffer intensely” and that her illness lasted five days. Her husband, who was probably with her all through the birth and subsequent illness, was “all but frantick [sic] with grief…” “What will poor Frederick do!” wrote his sister-in-law, Sarah Tuckerman, ” and those poor children too, left without a mother!  How short is life, how near is death to us.  I feel so sad that I can hardly write.”

Puerperal fever victims suffer from a bacterial infection “caused by organisms such as the Group A Streptococcus (GAS) bacteria which, if untreated, may lead to toxic shock syndrome, multi-organ failure and death.” The bacteria cause heavy fever as the infection spreads and the abdomen swells with peritonitis. There is usually intense pain: “the severity of the pain often increased to such intensity that there are many reports of patients who emitted a continuous cry of agony or alternatively were frozen in speechless terror by the severity of their pain.”² Occasionally the sufferer experienced a diminution of the pain that appeared to mean an improvement in the case, when in fact it meant that death was imminent.

I make these observations about Anna’s death because it was an event that affected her widower profoundly, and for the rest of his life. Of the poetry Frederick Tuckerman wrote after the event, much is suffused with his memory of Anna and his sense of loss.³ Her violent end haunted him, and it haunts those of his readers who know the story and can imagine that “one mild face, with suffering lined.”  He came by his grief honestly.

Anna and Frederick have been on my mind recently because in 2013 we received as gifts a small collection of images of the couple. A few of them have been published before, but in poor reproductions, and a few have never been published. Frederick’s birthday was in early February, so to mark the occasion here are the images.  Click on any image for a larger gallery view.

Frederick Tuckerman has often been referred to as a “forgotten” or “neglected” poet, and yet his work has been published in several volumes (beginning with his own privately published volume in 1860, reprinted thereafter) and reviewed many times.  He has been anthologized.  There is a biography.  Harvard owns most of his manuscripts.   Behold — he has a Wikipedia page.  He is not hard to find.  Perhaps it is time, then, that we cease to refer to him as “neglected” or “forgotten” — those words have the ring of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and of pathos.   The most recent publication of his work is in Ben Mazer’s wonderful volume “Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman” (2010), with its introduction by Professor Stephen Burt of Harvard.  Because I could not possibly say it better, and because I’m happy to plug the book, here are several quotes from Burt’s introduction about Tuckerman, with page numbers in parentheses afterward:

Tuckerman had a superb ear, a sense of the music in a pentameter line, rare in any country or century.  He had, too, a sensitive, and an unflinching attention to the psychology of mourning; and he made a strenuous and reflective attempt to reconcile his melancholy temperament with religious faith. (Introduction: x)

He showed his technique in a panoply of sonnets whose variety expanded the limits of the fourteen-line form.  He did so as a poet of New England, of its landscapes, its local history (“Wassahoale” and “sagamore George”), and especially its plant life: he became an American poet of natural history, the American poet who best records the failure of the nineteenth-century enterprise called natural theology. The Tuckerman of the sonnet series looks into himself, looks at the mullein’s golden stalks and at the ocean’s crests and troughs, looks for evidence of a just God there, and discovers – perhaps without ever having read Darwin – that such evidence is not to be found.  (x-xi)

Tuckerman became at once a student of grief and a student of botany, seeking at once leafy detail for its own sake (he always finds it) and evidence of God’s plan for us (which he does not find)… (xiii)

This poet of grief and of natural history is also our first dedicated American poet of the disenchanted, inhuman biosphere: as much as his rhetoric belongs to his era, as much as he does retain a Christian faith, he seems at times closer to Nature, the scientific journal, than to Wordsworth’s Nature (which ‘never did betray/The heart that loved her’)…  (xiii)

In Tuckerman’s best poems natural theology, the claim that we can know God through an ordered nature, becomes inseparable from a mourner’s theodicy, the attempt to get past personal loss by proving that God’s ways are after all just. (xv; for an example of “a mourner’s theodicy,” see note 4 below.)

The sonnet sequences begin by asking – they never stop asking – how to connect flora and fauna to human loss and human truth, and whether that connection can even be made. (xvii)

The gallery of images below includes several selections from Tuckerman’s work.  The poems are all from the Archives copy of his privately published edition of 1860.

Notes and selected links

(1) “Roughly speaking, there were, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about 2-3 deaths and 6-9 cases in every 1,000 deliveries. In epidemics, of course, there were far more.” Loudon, Irvine. The tragedy of childbed fever. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 6.

(2) Ibid, p. 7.

(3) In his biography of Frederick Tuckerman (“Beyond Romanticism,” 1990), Eugene England suggests that Frederick felt guilt over Anna’s death “perhaps for some failure to provide medical care” (p 120).  I believe there is no evidence for this idea beyond the “guilt” in his poems.  Anna would have had a midwife or doctor (either one probably the source of her infection) for a home birth, as was customary at the time.  Furthermore, the nature of puerperal fever was that once it struck, nothing could be done — there was no other effective “medical care” to provide.   Today a patient would get a course of antibiotics and most likely recover completely.

(4) As an example of “a mourner’s theodicy,” consider this excerpt from a letter about Anna’s death from Mary May, Frederick Tuckerman’s aunt, to Sarah Tuckerman, his sister-in-law: “These are sore trials.  There is nothing for us to say, when such come – but that the Giver has exercised his right, & we must submit.  –tis a hard lesson, & few attain it perfectly, few who sincerely say “thy will be done.” (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Cushing-Tuckerman-Esty Papers, letter of May 24, 1857; letters quoted earlier also from this collection)

******************************************************************************

Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard.  Poems (1864): http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011561943

Mazer, Ben.  Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/456169890

Loudon, Irvine.  The Tragedy of Childbed Fever: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41419618

England, Eugene.  Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman’s Life and Poetry: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/243706071

Hudgins, Andrew.  “‘A Monument of labor Lost’: The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman”: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25305477

Groves, Jeffrey.  “A Letter from Frederick Goddard Tuckerman to James T. Fields”: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817219

Golden, Samuel.  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/711989

Wilson, Edmund.  Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/207025

Bynner, Witter.  The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1482436

Winters, Yvor.  “A Discovery: The Cricket,  by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman”: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3847469

Eaton, Walter Pritchard.  “A Forgotten American Poet”: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26405/26405-h/26405-h.htm

Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard.  “The Cricket” (1950 Cummington Press version): http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4289505

–”The Cricket,” Massachusetts Review, Autumn, 1960, vol. 2, issue 1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25086599

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/frederick-goddard-tuckerman

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174269 (Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest”)

The year was 1936, the peak of the Great Depression, not exactly a time when opera was a primary concern of most New Yorkers. But for Miller Reese Hutchison, listening to the Operatic Musicale on WNYC was transcendent. Hutchison, an electrical engineer and inventor who designed the first portable hearing aid, sent off a note of gratitude to his friend, WNYC Chief Announcer, Tommy Cowan.

Having been Thomas Edison’s ‘right hand man’ before striking out on his own, Hutchison knew his superheterodynes from beat frequency oscillators and would probably be working in Silicon Valley were he alive today. So, it’s significant that he praised WNYC’s ‘absence of tube noises’ and ‘static’ on the AM signal, an inherently static-prone medium.

Curiously, the man with more than 1,000 patents also strikes a populist chord, calling for WNYC to air more operas for the “masses” who can’t afford at seat at the Met, but “who more thoroughly understand and more highly appreciate classical music than do the majority of their fortunate brethren.”

Read an excerpt of his letter here:

“At 2:30 P.M. today, I happened to ‘tune in’ on WNYC. Although I busily was engaged in an experiment in my laboratory; when I heard the sweet strains of the Operatic Musicale, I could not resist the temptation of listening to the end.

I want to compliment WNYC on the selection. The rendition was preferable to renditions of like character which have been broadcast directly from the Metropolitan. Your electrical equipment is in perfect order, as is attested by the clear, clean-cut reproduction of electrical transcriptions as well as of direct studio productions. There is entire absence of tube noises and static produced by unclear electrical connections.

Your voice retains the timbre and clear enunciation which caused your selection as the original announcer of WJZ, away back in 1917 when, you will remember, I went down to the headquarters, in Newark, from [the] Edison Laboratory, to attend the ‘christening’ of the station.

I hope WNYC will frequently broadcast electrical transcriptions of Grand Opera and that time will be allotted in which to render complete operas.

The masses cannot, with but few exceptions, afford attendance at the Metropolitan: yet they more thoroughly understand and more highly appreciate classical music than do the majority of their more fortunate brethren. One has but to witness the long lines of poorly clad people who, even in the most inclement weather, stand for hours to gain access to the galleries of the Metropolitan, to understand just how much such music means to them.

It becomes irksome, to real lovers of music, to listen to the tin can dribble sent out by most stations. WNYC is the Peoples’ Station. I know of no better way in which to endear the masses to the wonderfully efficient Administration of our City than would be the very frequent broadcasting of entire operas.

Evenings would, of course, be a better time than afternoons, because many of the working people are on their jobs: but there are tens of thousands who are not so fortunate as to have employment and who, during their period of enforced idleness, greatly would be uplifted by these Divinely created operas.

Endeavor to persuade our great, humanitarian Mayor, who so often has demonstrated his affection for the Common People, to allow the station to broadcast entire operas, at least once a week. There would be thousands of grateful hearts who would be the beneficiaries…” *

The ability to experience beautiful music was something of a passion for Miller Reese Hutchison. His Acousticon hearing aid was hailed as a miracle device in the early 20th Century. He also developed related inventions known as the Massacon and Akoulalion, which converted audio into vibrations, to aid the deaf and those with profound hearing loss. 

                  1905 Ad for Miller Reese Hutchison’s Acouticon and Massacon (WNYC Archive Collections)

__________________________________________________________

*Hutchison, Miller Reese, Letter to Thomas H. Cowan, March 31, 1936, Thomas H. Cowan Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

If you happened to have stumbled upon this page, I highly suspect you have an interest in either women’s history, archives, education, activism, or perhaps all of the above.

If this is the case (… I sincerely hope this is the case, or you’ll likely find this site pretty disappointing…), this is just a quick post to direct you toward our events page, as we have several workshops and open days on offer in the next couple of months.

While we are still offering school workshops, we’re also focusing on adult learning opportunities… so take a look, and see if there’s anything of interest.  We’re looking forward to engaging with new audiences, so we hope to see some of your faces!

Events include…

• The International Women’s Day Conference at London Metropolitan Archives, Sisters are Doing it for Themselves: 7 March 2014.
• Annual Study Day at the Institute of Education’s Newsam Library & Archives on 25 March 2014.  This year’s theme is “Anthem for doomed youth”? Exploring conflict & resolution through archives.
• In conjunction with London Metropolitan Archives, we’ll be holding an Open Day at LMA on 9 May 2014, with speakers, document viewing, and discussion groups.  The theme of the day is Educating Londoners: Sharing Experiences in the Archives.

Tagged: archives, International Women’s Day, London Metropolitan Archives

Jessica Morris
Thursday, February 27, 2014 – 16:48

On 25 February 2014, the State Information Management Services team (SIMS) of the State Records Office (SRO) ran an Information Session on the new General Disposal Authority for State Government Information (GDASG) to assist State government agencies with the implementation of this new disposal tool.

The session was opened to those in State Government agencies responsible for the appraisal, sentencing and disposal of State records and to Recordkeeping Consultants.  It proved to be popular with approximately 190 attending from a diverse range of State government agencies and Consultancy groups.

The session described how the GDASG encompasses Administrative records, Human Resource Management records, and Financial and Accounting records.  It is a single document that complements the Retention and Disposal Schedules (Schedules) that every State government agency has developed for its core business records.  It is a noteworthy achievement that with the GDASG and the individual agency Schedules, Western Australia has full coverage for the disposal of State Government information.

In addition, details were provided on the structure and content, the ‘how to’ of sentencing and resentencing records, and on the tools developed to assist agencies with implementation.  These tools are available on our website under General Disposal Authorities.

Attendees’ feedback was very positive.  Further sessions will be conducted in both metropolitan and regional areas.

The SIMS team are available to provide further assistance to State government agencies on the implementation of the GDASG and can be contacted via the following:

State Information Management Services

Phone: (08) 9427 3661
Fax: (08) 9427 3638
email: sro@sro.wa.gov.au

Stills similar to the one represented in this drawing were used to make distilled liquors and were commonly used in America during the early 19th-century. And their “descendants” are still being found in the mountains of rural America!

A preview of an exhibit planned for 2015 here at the National Archives: “Spirited Republic.”

Eli Barnum & Benj. Brooks Still Design Patent, 1808

Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, National Archives Identifier 305887… [ Read all ]

We’re just a few days from our Thursday lecture and opening of the Bodoni exhibition, so I wanted to offer one more blog post. First, because I wanted to share the great poster that graphic designer Michael McDermott designed for the event. Here it is:

One of the great things about it is that it’s designed so that each panel can be printed on a sheet of 11″x17″ paper, creating a giant version of the poster. Here’s an example in the wild:

Second, I wanted to share one image of something you can’t see in the exhibition:

This is the title page of a type specimen (with a great border) by the Amoretti brothers of Parma. It’s often the case with exhibitions of books that there are a lot of openings from individual volumes that you’d love to show, but in the end you usually can only pick one. In this instance the title page lost out to another opening. But that’s just a reminder that if you see something that interests you in an exhibition you can always come back and work with the whole book, cover to cover, on your own.

From the October, 1943 WQXR Program Guide:

The author of this peek behind the scenes at WQXR is one of our program editors. His specialty is the lighter classics, and he knows that kind of music from Arensky to Ziehrer. Among the WQXR programs Mr. Simon produces are Just Music, The Maxwell House Dinner Concert, The American Express Cavalcade of Music and The Operetta Scrapbook.

The scene is a good-sized square room containing three desks, Kardex filing systems which give detailed information regarding every one of the thousands of records in WQXR’s library, more filing cabinets, books about music and musicians, and the usual things you see in an office. The occupants of the room: Ann Cornish, attractive and blonde, who programs the classical music; Walter Diehl, tall, slender and studious, who writes most of the musical continuity and is in charge of records and myself.

As the curtain rises, it’s about 9:45 on a September morning. Ann, Walter and I are seated at our desks. The telephone rings (as it always seems to at the rise of the curtain). Ann, who is nearest the ‘phone, picks up the receiver, and here’s what follows. “That’s the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka by Johann Strauss…Tritsch-Tratsch…no, Tritsch-Tratsch…T-R-I-T-S-C-H…No, ‘T’….That’s right, Tritsch…The second word is Tratsch…No, Tratsch…T-R-A-T-S-C-H…No, that’s also at ‘T’…That’s right, Tritsch-Tratsch…It’s by Johann Strauss…You’re welcome.” (Remember, this sort of thing happens dozens of times a day!)

A rather tall, dark, smartly-dressed woman breezes through the room, and though she looks pretty serious, gives us a cheerful “Hello.” It’s Lisa Sergio, who’ll be on the air in a few minutes…Eddy Brown comes in and asks Walter, “Do you want to go over the program now?” meaning that he’s ready to give Walter the facts about the selections he’s going to conduct that night on the Stromberg-Carlson show…One of the announcers, Everett Ball, who is in charge of the Request Program, comes in to work at the record files, every so often give the clock a furtive glance and rushing back to the studio to announce a “spot”…Eleven o’clock, and a loud-speaker in an adjoining office gives forth with the cheerful Ballet Music from “Faust” which the equally cheerful Alma Dettinger uses as the theme for Other People’s Business…The ‘phone once again…I take it this time…A listener wants to know the record number of the Waldteufel waltz on Just Music Tuesday night. ‘That isn’t a record,’ I explain, It’s a transcription made only for broadcasting purposes, and can’t be played on a phonograph.”…Flo Atanasin, our glamorous assistant, comes to consult Grove’s Dictionary for some dope on Dietrich Buxtehude…Norman McGee of the sales department tells me the Maxwell House Dinner Concert needs a Caruso record to tie in with the commercial spot on tonight’s program…Eleanor Sanger, our program director who has been approving advance October programs, informs me, “Ann has the London Again Suite on the Altman show on October 22nd at 9:30, and you’ve just had it on ‘Just Music,’ that night. Can you give me something to substitute for it?”…Allan Kalmus, our publicity director, drops in…”Got any story I can use on Monday’s American Express show with Rettenberg?”…Doug Blaufarb, our news editor, pops in with “Hey, you guys, I’m famished. How about some food?”

Two o’clock or so, and Abram Chasins appears in the music room. “Ann, here’s some good material for Memorable Programs of the Past….”Walter, you wanted to know about my Treasury speech next Sunday. Oh, say four and a half minutes”…And again, the ‘phone…”You played something on one of your programs about ten days ago. I forget what time it was, but I think it was in the evening, and it sounded something like a waltz. Can you tell me what it was?”…Lou Kleinklaus of the engineering staff drops in with a couple of notations about worn records or transcriptions that need replacement…From the announcers’ room next door we hear the voices of some of the afternoon people…the young enthusiastic one of Allen Ward…a guffaw from Duncan Pirnie…Mel Elliott, Al Grobe and Woody Leafer heatedly discussing the correct pronunciation of a Russian village…Estelle Sternberger and Rax Benware on politics.   

Along about ten to five the closing theme of the Symphonic Matinee reaches our ears . That’ll mean the ‘phone again–and sure enough, there it is…”It’s the Arioso from the Bach cantata #156, I Stand with One Foot in the Grave “…It’s somewhat of a temptation, for the sake of a gag, to say that at the end of the day at WQXR Ann, Walter and I feel as though we had one foot in the grave. But that isn’t the case at all. The three of us are singularly happy in our jobs, and consequently we rather feel inclined to tritsch-tratsch gaily back home for an evening of good music over WQXR.   

                                                                              WQXR’s Kardex record catalog for the WQXR library. ____________________________________

Editor’s Note: Alfred E. Simon died in 1991 at the age of 83. He was Director of Light Music for WQXR for more than 20 years. With Richard Lewine, he wrote three books devoted to the musical theater: The Encyclopedia of Theater Music (1961), Songs of the American Theater (1973) and Songs of the Theater (1984). With Robert Kimball, he wrote The Gershwins (1973), which traced the lives of George and Ira Gershwin in words and pictures. Simon had also served as a rehearsal pianist for the original Broadway production of the Gershwins’ musical Of Thee I Sing and had accompanied their sister on her record album Frances Gershwin — For George and Ira With Love.

Here in Archives and Special Collections, we tend to talk a lot about the material history of our books. Often the idea is a new one to students who are used to thinking of books as texts not objects.

These days, my favorite book-as-object topic is early library marks. We have many books with bookplates from personal and institutional libraries – which is not surprising since the wealthy and educated were for many centuries the primary consumers of books. It isn’t until the 18th and 19th centuries that literacy and books become more available to the middle and lower classes and we begin to see ownership marks from social, circulating and public libraries. It is these questions of who had access to books, which books, under what terms, and in service of what guiding ideology, that I find most fascinating.

Social Libraries
There is some agreement that the first proto-public library in the United States was Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia begun in 1731. This library, and the many others that followed it’s lead, worked on a membership or subscription model. Members would purchase a share of the library, or pay a regular fee and would in exchange have the privilege of borrowing books under the terms set out, although the details varied greatly.

While we do have a representative from the elite Boston Library Society, I find these interesting because most of them are from small western Massachusetts towns. They are a window into what local people may have been reading (albeit, local people with enough money to pay the subscription fee). Particularly intriguing are the 45 plus books in our collection that were at one point a part of the Shutesbury Library – and that the library was seemingly open only four times a year! Most of the books instruct borrowers to return the books on the first Monday of March, June, September or December.

Circulating Libraries
While social libraries tended to be founded and patronized by upstanding citizens in a spirit of mutual improvement (generally reflected by the religious, or a least serious, nature of the books), circulating libraries were more typically business ventures. They were often owned and run by a bookseller or individual who charged by the book, sometimes with options to purchase, and often carried more popular and frivolous books like (heaven forbid!) novels.

If social libraries were a self-improvement project, and circulating libraries a capitalist one, then there were also a number of libraries that would fall under the “improvement of others” category, others in this case including both race and class.

Various libraries were set up by factory owners or other beneficent donors for lower class workers. The idea being that education would raise the workers out of the habits of poverty (aka ethnic traditions) make upstanding, clean-living citizens of them.

On the other side of the ideological spectrum was the library set up by the Free Congregational Society of Florence, Mass. The Society was founded in 1863 in the pursuit of “good morals, general education and liberal religious sentiments” and made explicit in its founding documents that it would not discriminate on the basis of “sex, or color or nationality”. While the library began with a membership or fee requirement, it was waived and became free and open to all (as you can see in the penciled note above). In this case, education for all is still the goal, but with a very different flavor to it.

All these trends in libraries (along with academic libraries), combined to give life to the public library. Public libraries took off in the late 19th century on the wings of cheaper books and a sentiment that free education was key to a good and productive citizenry. And we, the book loving public, haven’t looked back since.

Here in Archives and Special Collections, we tend to talk a lot about the material history of our books. Often the idea is a new one to students who are used to thinking of books as texts not objects.

These days, my favorite book-as-object topic is early library marks. We have many books with bookplates from personal and institutional libraries – which is not surprising since the wealthy and educated were for many centuries the primary consumers of books. It isn’t until the 18th and 19th centuries that literacy and books become more available to the middle and lower classes and we begin to see ownership marks from social, circulating and public libraries. It is these questions of who had access to books, which books, under what terms, and in service of what guiding ideology, that I find most fascinating.

Social Libraries
There is some agreement that the first proto-public library in the United States was Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia begun in 1731. This library, and the many others that followed it’s lead, worked on a membership or subscription model. Members would purchase a share of the library, or pay a regular fee and would in exchange have the privilege of borrowing books under the terms set out, although the details varied greatly.

While we do have a representative from the elite Boston Library Society, I find these interesting because most of them are from small western Massachusetts towns. They are a window into what local people may have been reading (albeit, local people with enough money to pay the subscription fee). Particularly intriguing are the 45 plus books in our collection that were at one point a part of the Shutesbury Library – and that the library was seemingly open only four times a year! Most of the books instruct borrowers to return the books on the first Monday of March, June, September or December.

Circulating Libraries
While social libraries tended to be founded and patronized by upstanding citizens in a spirit of mutual improvement (generally reflected by the religious, or a least serious, nature of the books), circulating libraries were more typically business ventures. They were often owned and run by a bookseller or individual who charged by the book, sometimes with options to purchase, and often carried more popular and frivolous books like (heaven forbid!) novels.

If social libraries were a self-improvement project, and circulating libraries a capitalist one, then there were also a number of libraries that would fall under the “improvement of others” category, others in this case including both race and class.

Various libraries were set up by factory owners or other beneficent donors for lower class workers. The idea being that education would raise the workers out of the habits of poverty (aka ethnic traditions) make upstanding, clean-living citizens of them.

On the other side of the ideological spectrum was the library set up by the Free Congregational Society of Florence, Mass. The Society was founded in 1863 in the pursuit of “good morals, general education and liberal religious sentiments” and made explicit in its founding documents that it would not discriminate on the basis of “sex, or color or nationality”. While the library began with a membership or fee requirement, it was waived and became free and open to all (as you can see in the penciled note above). In this case, education for all is still the goal, but with a very different flavor to it.

All these trends in libraries (along with academic libraries), combined to give life to the public library. Public libraries took off in the late 19th century on the wings of cheaper books and a sentiment that free education was key to a good and productive citizenry. And we, the book loving public, haven’t looked back since.

We’re less than a week from our big Bodoni celebration (you’re invited), so here’s an example of the kind of thing you can look for if you visit the exhibition.

One of Bodoni’s predecessors (and the man whose types he first used when he set up the press in Parma) was Pierre Simon Fournier, the great French typographer best known, perhaps, for his origination of the point system that became the basis for the system we use today. In 1766 he published the Manuel Typographique, and below on the left is a scan of the letter A from that book, which is on display in the exhibition.

On the right is an A from Giambattista Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico, posthumously published in 1818. There is a long list of reasons not to make too much of the comparison (each A is just one example of just one letter, at a large size, etc.). But it’s still kind of fun to view a 50-year evolution of a letter in detail.

And just in case you want to see it in motion:

Hopefully you’ll be able to join us on the 27th for this typographic celebration, with a lecture by Matthew Carter at 6:00 pm. The Washington Street entrance will be open at 5:00, and I’ll be offering a short guided tour of the exhibition at 5:30. The exhibition will be up (in the Providence Journal Rhode Island Room) through April 19th.

More information is available on the Library website.

On the occasion of the international conference “La Floride Francaise. Florida, France and the Francophone world ” organized by the Winthrop-King Institute at FSU (20-21 February 2014); FSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives and North Redington Beach map seller La Rose des Vents present an exceptional selection of antique maps and documents reflecting French involvement in Florida during four centuries.

Between the middle years of the sixteenth century and the early nineteenth century Florida was a recurring concern of French governments in their attempts to introduce a French presence south of Canada. Maps of Florida, many of them produced in France but also in the Netherlands, England, Italy or the United States, thus represented tools for the military and diplomatic action of France, images sometimes fanciful of territories to conquer or reconquer, but mostly images of a dream conceived in Huguenot minds, at the height of the Religious Wars, a dream that never came to be true but fed a nostalgia that lived on long after Florida had ceased to be considered another viable Nouvelle France.

Located in the Strozier Library Gallery, the exhibit is open February 17 to March 21, 2014, Monday-Friday, 10am to 6pm.

The “Then and Now” project (also titled Portals to the Past) was inspired by a series of photographs found online, where photographers would superimpose their own family pictures onto the current location in the photograph. When I began taking these photographs for my beginning digital photography class in March 2012, they were assigned as a “Visual Poetry” assignment, which required us to tell a story with a series of photographs. I originally wanted to take HDR landscape photos transitioning from day to night, but while thinking about other possible photographs, I ran into the website DearPhotograph.com. This blog features hundreds (probably thousands) of photographs taken by people from all around the world, showing their historical family photographs superimposed onto the present scene. Seeing these photos is what sparked my imagination and helped me develop the idea of taking Trinity University’s historical photographs and incorporating this type of photography.

I remembered seeing photos on one of the school’s servers and went searching for potential photos to use. The only criteria I used to select the photos was if there was a significant change in scenery. The number of photos I could use were limited since many of those I found were taken from the one of the older campuses, in an ambiguous location, or in a helicopter (I’m betting aerial views would be pretty hard to superimpose…). I did eventually find the ones I would use for my very first photos, including the historical photo of the reflection pond, and the photo of cardiac hill.

Not only was I limited in what photos I could use, but my camera was clearly not suited for this type of photography! At the time, I was using a Canon t1i with an 18-55mm. The idea was to be able to have a wide enough view to see how the present scene differs from the past photograph, but with the equipment I was using, I was only able to get a limited view of the scene in one shot. Therefore, with the exception of one photograph, the final pictures that were produced were composed of 3-9 photographs each. The photo of the cactus garden behind Calvert Hall, was composed of 9 vertical pictures stitched together oh Photoshop. This method was necessary in order achieve a wide angle view of the scene, but could be achieved by simply using a wide-angle lens. After critiquing the three initial photographs submitted to my fellow students in class, one of my friends, Jane, insisted that I showed my work to her art history professor, Kathryn O’Rourke, who mentioned that she was working with Amy Roberson from Special Collections on another project and that my project could potentially be incorporated into her first-year class the following fall semester. Dr. O’Rourke forwarded some photos to me from Special Collections and ultimately virtually introduced me to Amy, who guided me through selecting even more photos from Special Collections. When I met Amy in the summer for the first time, I was shown the enormous library of photographs that Amy had, and it blew my mind. I remember when she pulled out a long drawer of cards and told me to go through some of the cards to see if I liked the description of the photos. There must have been tens of thousands of cards for me to choose from! Amy had photos both in the form of reversal film, film negatives, prints, and digital collections. Before working on this project, I had no idea that Special Collections would have the amount of photos it did, let alone the different forms of photos it had. I eventually found a number of potential photographs and finished my project, launching the mini exhibit the following fall semester with the help of Dr. O’Rourke’s students. Overall, I am grateful to have been able to see a small assignment turn into a collaborative project involving so many different people that made this project a success.

We love the pieces that Anh-Viet created using our collections. Thank you!

From the February, 1943 WQXR Program Guide:

Prof. Moore as head of the Music Department of Columbia University is not only famous as an educator but also well known as a composer and writer. He is the composer of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and as the author of “From Madrigal to Modern Music,” is particularly well qualified to write on this subject.

Something has happened to take the sting out of the adjective ‘modern’ when applied to music. A few years ago a public which turned naturally to modern novels, modern poetry, modern painting and architecture practically rushed for the exits when a piece of modern music reared its ugly head in the concert hall. Only a devoted few in this country attempted to keep pace with the contemporary composers, and they were usually suspected of being either snobs or dangerous radicals. But it is all very different now. The biggest drawing card that the orchestras have at the moment is a brand new Russian symphony, written by a composer who was scarcely known to the large public a few years ago, Shostakovich. Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps is practically a household favorite. A new American opera by Randall Thompson, broadcast last spring, has been repeated twice over the same station within six months, by popular demand. There are to be several concerts this winter in Town Hall, each devoted to the compositions of young and progressive American composers. Even the Town Hall Endowment Series, catering to a public conspicuously devoted to “standard brands,” announces a concert of world premieres, chamber music of Copland, Gruenberg, Jacobi, Martinu, Milhaud and Piston.

All this sounds either as if modern music has been played so much that a taste for it is actually developing, or that the article itself is not as formerly advertised. Probably both causes are at work.

The League of Composers, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, is certainly entitled to much credit for unwavering devotion to the encouragement of contemporary music. When the top musical organizations of the country were at their reactionary worst, and the music which was played everywhere in Europe was almost unheard in our own concert halls and opera houses, the League, with its chamber, orchestra, and operatic performances and its admirably edited magazine Modern Music, stepped into the breach and kept the issue of the validity of contemporary musical thought before the public. The W.P.A. instead of going the easy way and sticking in the rut of program conventionality experimented with contemporary American composers, both in its orchestral programs and in its most happily conceived forums of chamber music. The record companies and radio stations which might have been expected to cling to the safe and sane showed courage and initiative in bombarding the public with the new music, and from all accounts have found enough encouragement from their patrons to keep it up.

In the long run the public which pays the bills is the determining factor in selection of all programs. Our concert and opera audiences and, even more, those devoted individuals who comprise their boards are still largely unconvinced as to the attractiveness of modern music. People have always preferred familiar music to adventures in the unknown, and the twentieth century has some pretty stiff competition from the great music of the past, probably now more widely known and understood than ever before. But there seem to be an increasing number of music lovers who have discovered that a piece of modern music may be easy to listen to as well as stimulating and provocative. No one will be converted to the cause by appeals for support or admonitions as to duty. The music itself must do it. One satisfied customer is worth a dozen pamphlets or articles. 

And this is apparently just what is happening. For a time it looked as if there were so much that was new in the way of musical resource, atonality, polytonality, primitive rhythm, meterless rhythm, neo-classicism and neo-romanticism that the composer became a sort of harassed laboratory technician, solving problems, concocting horrible mixtures by scientific formulae and forgetting the public that had no wish to serve as guinea pig but had a definite desire to enjoy its music. The laboratory period seems now to have disappeared overnight. Many useful ideas have come out of it and as a result, our music of the twentieth century will have a personality and importance all its own. But practically every composer of today has become aware of the fact that audiences exist, and that music is something communicable. It is vastly more satisfactory to address an audience than to write for each other’s distinctly limited appreciation. And this does not mean writing down either. It simply means a realization that music lovers, nourished by a devotion to the traditional, can assimilate the new only when it is skillfully blended with the old and is intelligibly and attractively presented.

And so the public which has heard enough modern music so that it does not blench at a dissonance, and has learned that a living composer is not necessarily inferior to a dead one, and that not every symphony can be expected to be another Eroica nor every opera a reincarnated Carmen, is turning a more friendly ear to a group of modern composers who are basking in the unaccustomed warmth of sympathy and appreciation. The exits are still in demand but at least there is no more rush.

Please join us for a poetry reading from, Collected Poems, with Mike Papadeas on Friday, February 21 at 5:00 p.m. in Special Collections. 

read more

Here in the Reading Room of the Special Collections, we have on semi-permanent exhibit a 3 piece unique art collection comprised of a newspaper publication, a lead-encased book of posters, and a one-of-a-kind art installation.  The installation consists of 432 color slides permanently mounted in a sizable light box.  The slides show the creation and in situ installations of street art posters from Bullet Space’s “Your House is Mine” project. The light box itself is constructed from a frame originally used for the silkscreen printing of the posters.

Bullet Space is a community center born out of the 1980′s squatter movement in the Lower East Side of New York City.  Self-defined as an “act of resistance” and as “a community access center for images, words, and sounds of the inner city,” Bullet Space began the “Your House is Mine” project in 1988 in protest against social and economic inequality, specifically in reaction to the gentrification of the Lower East Side and the Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988.  Creating and installing public posters, neighborhood artists focused their activism on housing, healthcare, economic, and other civil rights.  The “Your House is Mine” ethos will resonate with many when reflecting on the current Occupy Movement, similarly concerned with economic disparity and social inequality.

The use of posters on building facades worked to transform neighborhood streets into a visual dialogue about private vs. public spaces, the significance of walls and enclosures vs. parks and streets, the imbalance between those inside the buildings and those without.

In addition to the posters, Bullet Space created a newspaper publication with text and images concerning these social issues for easy distribution in the streets and dissemination of ideas.  The publication of the newspaper was followed, in contrast, by the creation of a 16 lb. lead-encased book of similar text and handmade posters.  I think there is obvious intentionality in the creation of a book that is difficult to use, that is not meant to be passed around or read with ease.  Compared with the shareable newsprint, this unwieldy book, too large and heavy to be read on a park bench or on the subway, emphasizes the exclusivity of urban housing and private spaces.

Lit up or dark, the light box piece is a statement upon homelessness and housing security.  To my eye, the un-illuminated light box evokes numerous empty, abandoned windows in a cityscape.  The formation of the dark slides and white edges seem to draw upon the urban grid for layout, while representing the labyrinthine system of housing and ownership, and the rigidity of gentrification.  When turned on, the light box exhibits hundreds of images of the artists’ and activists’ posters installed on city walls.

Come check out the newspaper, the 16 lb. lead book, and the light box installation in the Reading Room.  You can’t miss them.

Here in the Reading Room of the Special Collections, we have on semi-permanent exhibit a 3 piece unique art collection comprised of a newspaper publication, a lead-encased book of posters, and a one-of-a-kind art installation.  The installation consists of 432 color slides permanently mounted in a sizable light box.  The slides show the creation and in situ installations of street art posters from Bullet Space’s “Your House is Mine” project. The light box itself is constructed from a frame originally used for the silkscreen printing of the posters.

Bullet Space is a community center born out of the 1980′s squatter movement in the Lower East Side of New York City.  Self-defined as an “act of resistance” and as “a community access center for images, words, and sounds of the inner city,” Bullet Space began the “Your House is Mine” project in 1988 in protest against social and economic inequality, specifically in reaction to the gentrification of the Lower East Side and the Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988.  Creating and installing public posters, neighborhood artists focused their activism on housing, healthcare, economic, and other civil rights.  The “Your House is Mine” ethos will resonate with many when reflecting on the current Occupy Movement, similarly concerned with economic disparity and social inequality.

The use of posters on building facades worked to transform neighborhood streets into a visual dialogue about private vs. public spaces, the significance of walls and enclosures vs. parks and streets, the imbalance between those inside the buildings and those without.

In addition to the posters, Bullet Space created a newspaper publication with text and images concerning these social issues for easy distribution in the streets and dissemination of ideas.  The publication of the newspaper was followed, in contrast, by the creation of a 16 lb. lead-encased book of similar text and handmade posters.  I think there is obvious intentionality in the creation of a book that is difficult to use, that is not meant to be passed around or read with ease.  Compared with the shareable newsprint, this unwieldy book, too large and heavy to be read on a park bench or on the subway, emphasizes the exclusivity of urban housing and private spaces.

Lit up or dark, the light box piece is a statement upon homelessness and housing security.  To my eye, the un-illuminated light box evokes numerous empty, abandoned windows in a cityscape.  The formation of the dark slides and white edges seem to draw upon the urban grid for layout, while representing the labyrinthine system of housing and ownership, and the rigidity of gentrification.  When turned on, the light box exhibits hundreds of images of the artists’ and activists’ posters installed on city walls.

Come check out the newspaper, the 16 lb. lead book, and the light box installation in the Reading Room.  You can’t miss them.