A few months ago, we shared a University Gallery general promotional brochure from the 1970s. Just this past week, we encountered a 1990s version of the institution’s promotional materials:
I wonder what the WAM brochure will look like upon re-opening in 2011?
On a typical shift in the archives processing room, I often sit across the room from another intern who is working on a different project sorting through handwritten letters – one type of archival material.
What is interesting to me about the WAM collection is that I often don’t know what to expect – what type of material to expect – when removing the lid of the next box.
For instance, take a Tuesday afternoon from two weeks ago. I removed the lid of soon-to-be box 116 to find the draft of a catalogue for a Mimbres pottery exhibition right on top of the folders. The draft, too large to fit upright in the standard archival box, had been casually placed on top. I made note of the oversized material and set it aside along with other items we’ve encountered that didn’t quite “fit.”
After getting through a few folders, I was taken aback upon opening the front fold of a folder containing planning correspondence for the Mimbres pottery exhibit, as a mysterious foreign object flew up and landed back down on the folder. Not really sure what it was – I convinced myself it was a old dried up piece of granola or a stray piece of corkboard – and logically determined it should not be kept in the folder, but rather discarded.
That was soon followed by a dry and crumbly rubber band that had partially attached itself like a parasite – through some scientific process – to correspondence from The Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite. Another rubber band contained within the folder shattered like glass upon touch…
And then there was a cut-out of an ear of corn…
Upon further examination, it was revealed to be part of the design of a brochure for a public work of art by artist Harriet Bart titled, “Harvest” that was installed/planted outside the Weisman in 1996.
Because the WAM collection contains the former working files of museum employees, processing the material gives us great insight into the personal organizational habits of certain individuals. For example, who ever was proofreading a draft of the label text to be used for the Mimbres pottery exhibit, cared to mark a passage with a sticky “Memo from Hell.”
Is this “memo” literal, or whimsical?
From my perspective, the presence of it in the WAM collection… is pretty typical.
A polaroid from July of 1993 features a small scale model of the Weisman Art Museum interior, which opened in November of that year. This represented a huge step for the University Art Museum—after 59 years of being housed in Northrop Auditorium’s upper floors, and many false starts at finding funds for another building, the museum was about to move into a world-class architectural wonder.
I recently got a peek into the new WAM expansion that is currently under construction, and spotted a scale model very much like this earlier one, outlining the gallery configuration and placement of art. The expansion will allow the museum to display more than three times as many objects from the permanent collection. Indeed, the “Little Gallery” has come a long way.
In the same file as the polaroid, I also found a set of blueprints for the Weisman Art Museum from the early 1990s. The most fascinating part to me was the tangle of lines and angles that illustrates the side facing the river—rather unusual in a blueprint, I would imagine.
Two gigantic paintings by James Rosenquist and Roy Litchenstein (both painted for the 1964 World Fair) have long been important works in the Weisman Art Museum’s collection. I discovered these newspaper clippings and some small photos from 1966 in the files, which commemorate the first display of these works in Northrop Auditorium, where the University Gallery resided. They had to be laid out on the ground for viewing, as there was no place to hang such large work (and as I gather, they are still a bear to move). Apparently, the paintings were created to represent current American culture at the World’s Fair in New York. Afterward, they were given to the University by the artists, which found a home for them in the Weisman Art Museum.
