We’ve now embarked on another project with Pratt Institute, also funded by IMLS, entitled CHART that is focused on digitizing historic photographs of Brooklyn. Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), is a cross-institutional collaboration between Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Public Library and us. At the end of this 3-year grant funded project, Project CHART will provide online access to historical documentary photographs of Brooklyn that were previously only available on-site at each institution.

Views: U.S., Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Packer Institute. View 007: Packer - view from the garden in winter. Lantern slide, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, CHART_2011. (S10_21_US_Brooklyn_Brooklyn_Packer_Institute007.jpg)

You can follow along and see some of the images the Brooklyn Museum CHART interns have already scanned which are presented on the Museum’s website.  We are uploading new images almost daily and eventually these images will be linked to others being digitized by the collaborating institutions.

We will be reporting on the progress of our CHART Project as it progresses. We hope that this project, already beneficial to the interns as a learning experience, will become a digital resource to the local, national and international research community and anyone else interested in the history and preservation of Brooklyn’s history.

We just had that opportunity when Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, came looking for objects to support a small installation built around a wonderful new acquisition.

Skylar Fein (American, born 1968). Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase, 2010. Acrylic on plaster and wood , 68 x 44 in. (172.7 x 111.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, 2010.66. © Skylar Fein. Image: Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

The new work is entitled Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase by Skylar Fein acquired through a purchase gift from Stephanie Ingrassia (a Brooklyn Museum Board Member) and her husband Tim. As the Museum Librarian, I was delighted when Eugenie selected three items from the Library collection to be included in this installation. Here was a great way to showcase seldom seen rare items from the Library collection and we jumped at the chance!

I encourage you all to come see this interesting installation located in the Special Exhibition Gallery on the Fifth Floor of the Museum. In addition to the Skylar Fein, you will see a small carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad looking at a photo album in Matthew Brady’s studio. The image, dated Feb. 9, 1864, was widely published and distributed especially after Lincoln was assasinated in April 1865.

One of my favorite magazines in the Library collection is Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Included in the installation is an issue of Harper’s dated June 1865 opened to Abraham Lincoln at Home. The beautiful wood engraving is surrounded by interesting text and advertisements that reflect what was happening when the magazine was published.

Pages from Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Images Bywater Bros. Editions.

The third item from the Library collection is a more recent publication—an artists’ book entitled Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Davey’s book presents close-up photographs of pennies found in the street. Her images highlight the oxidation and degradation of the coins, contrasting the effects of their daily use as currency with the ideals embodied by the image of Lincoln. “Copperhead” is slang for a penny, but it also refers to the term used in the nineteenth century for Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and the policies of Lincoln’s administration.

There are many more objects to be seen including wonderful silhouettes from the Museum’s Decorative Arts collection and a Kara Walker entitled Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.

This installation is visually and intellectually challenging as it shows how ideas and images have been communicated through time. A topic we can so easily build on through the extensive collections held here at the Brooklyn Museum!

Library records reveal early interest in this area with the acquisition of many titles we consider to be important today including George Catlin’s Illustrations of the manners, customs & condition of the North American Indians.

Native American art and culture has been an area of keen interest for this institution dating to the 1820’s with the Brooklyn Apprentices Library, the predecessor of the Brooklyn Museum. As this institution evolved from a library into a museum, plans were laid to develop an encyclopedic collection representing art and culture from around the world to be viewed by the citizens of Brooklyn and other local, national and international visitors. 1903 marked a new era for this institution with the establishment of a Department of Ethnology for “building up great ethnological collections, sending out expeditions for the acquiring of antiquities, first over all America, then over the entire world.”

Stewart Culin was hired as the first Curator of Ethnology and he quickly began to acquire collections representing Native American as well as African, Oceanic and Asian art and cultures. Culin worked alongside William Henry Goodyear, first Curator of Fine Arts, and Susan Hutchinson, founding Museum Librarian. The acquisitive force of these three long time Museum employees laid the foundation of the collections under the care of the Museum today.

Culin kept meticulous records on the people and places he visited in his travels across Native America and his Expedition Reports and research files embedded with images.

In the days before 35mm slides were available, glass lantern slides were collected by the Museum to supplement lectures given by curators and educators. Today many of these images are rare or unique.

Also on view in the Library Display cases located on the second floor of the Museum, we are showcasing a set of newly scanned images from the lantern slide collection. In addition, you’ll find several rare items related to the Tipi exhibition there including a set of silk-screened images of painted tipis.

We also have many books on tipis available in the Library, so come visit and learn more about Native American culture!

Keith DuQuette, Library Preservation Associate here, has created some wonderful “bookshelves” from the cards which are sold for the benefit of the Library.

The cards have an interesting history and were previously housed in sturdy, many drawered cabinets that were so long such a familiar part of the library landscape. The Catalogs were started somewhere around 1904 and were closed in 1994 and during that time held thousands of cards created over the course of many decades. Susan Hutchinson, the Museum’s Founding Librarian, reported in the Brooklyn Museum Annual Report for 1904 that there were 20,567 cards in the Library Catalog.  She also noted that there were 3,116 cards added and 3,677 cards revised for that year which was a massive undertaking since all the cards were handwritten at that time.

Over the years the card catalogs expanded as did research collections in both the Art Reference Library and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology. The cards reveal how the research collections grew and closely paralleled the building of the Museum’s object collections. Indeed there is an intellectual link between the Museum Library and the art collections since the Library very often reveals who made the objects, when, where and how.

The cards also reflect the current technology available at the time of their creation. Handwritten cards were created by the Library Staff until a typewriter became available; the typewriter was invented in 1873, but we do not have a fixed date for when one first began to be used by the Brooklyn Museum Library staff to generate cards for the catalogs. Despite this many of the cards continued to be annotated by hand since signs and symbols such as hieroglyphs could not be replicated on a typewriter. The Brooklyn Museum Library staff began to use Library of Congress printed cards in the 1940s. These cards were often enhanced with hand or type written annotations providing additional information specific to the item being cataloged such as edition size or other important details.

In 1984 the Brooklyn Museum became a special member of the Research Libraries Group and records representing the Library collections began to be entered into the Research Libraries Information Network, an international bibliographic database. Since then a massive effort has taken place to enter online records for the entire research collection to facilitate greater knowledge of all that could be found in the Libraries and Archives.  The Library Online Catalog was launched on the Internet in 2002.

If you visit the museum during hours when the Libraries and Archives are open (Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.), we are celebrating the history of these cards with a small display mounted on the Library Reading Room wall.  On view are fascinating pieces of taxonomic history—ranging from handwritten to typewritten to computer generated cards—reflecting the growth of the Brooklyn Museum Library collections.

I’m delighted to report that on March 6^th we had a well attended talk in the Library as part of a series of lectures presented in memory of Evelyn Ortner, a beloved Library Donor and Museum Guide who gave tours of the Egyptian collections. Our speaker was Dr. John Lundquist, former Curator of Asian and Middle Eastern Collections at the New York Public Library, who discussed nineteenth century references on Ancient Egypt. We own  several of the rare books that were discussed such as Belzoni’s Narrative of the Operations and Rosellini’s Monumenti dell’Egitto—you can even see one of the Rosellini volumes in the To Live Forever exhibition here. We also looked at several volumes of the Description de l’Egypte, the subject of a previous blog.

These rare books were from the personal library of Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-1896) remembered today as a scholar, collector and accurate copyist. Indeed the collections he assembled  became the foundation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian antiquities collection and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology. Captivated by Egypt and its monuments, Wilbour spent every winter in Egypt starting in 1880 until his death in 1896.

He used his houseboat, named “The Seven Hathors,” as a place to entertain his fellow Egyptologists, family and friends. Wilbour acquired all of the important texts published on ancient Egypt available at that time and used his personal library as a way to educate himself. He kept key works with him in Egypt so that he could carry the books to specific sites to compare the texts with the inscriptions on the monuments. His unique annotations to these texts are important to researchers especially since they document monuments that have deteriorated significantly since Wilbour’s time. According to his son-in-law, the artist Edwin H. Blashfield (1848-1936), his passion for Egypt was tireless:

“In the center of the space was his steamer trunk, on the same was the huge folio of Lepsius and behind it on a camp-stool was the Egyptologist comparing texts. He stood discomfort wonderfully – with the mercury at one hundred Fahrenheit in February, he could spend long hours some twenty-five feet above the pavement, with his folio propped somehow between ladder and Egyptian gods in incised relief, upon the outer wall of Edfou or some other temple. Very heavy boxes of books accompanied him everywhere …”

After Wilbour’s death his children offered his antiquities and library collection to the Brooklyn Museum as a memorial to their father. Wilbour’s heirs continued to donate objects to the Museum and in 1932, the Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund was set up by Victor Wilbour to support both the Library and the Egyptian collections here at the Brooklyn Museum.

Stay tuned as Tom Hardwick, an Egyptologist who is volunteering here, blogs about letters Wilbour wrote while he was in Egypt and if you are in the museum, drop by to see a selection of photographs, letters and books documenting Wilbour’s work and his family interests on view in the library display cases on the second floor. If you would like to visit the Wilbour Library of Egyptology just send us an e-mail—we’d love to see you!

This panel discussion, held Saturday June 13, 2009 at the Brooklyn Museum, addressed the production, collection, and display of Sufi-inspired artist books. Zahra Partovi, whose artist book Fragments of Light II is featured in the special exhibition Light of the Sufis, discussed her art in conversation with collaborating book artist Kelly Driscoll, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art Ladan Akbarnia, and Principal Librarian Deirdre Lawrence.

Vincent has been the primary leader in the overall conception, design and production of these books, pulling together incredibly talented artists and artisans to create them. The books, all inspired by the Sufi poetry of Rumi as translated by Zahra Partovi, are a jewel in the crown of our artists’ book collection and remain wonderful examples of how contemporary art can carry on the essence of traditional art.

How did these wonderful books come into the Brooklyn Museum collection?

Back in October 1998 the Brooklyn Museum held an exhibition entitled Royal Persian Paintings, The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925 curated by Dr. Layla Diba. This exhibition was one of several that Brooklyn has featured over the years and an example of the Museum’s long standing interest in Islamic art. The Library collection is also rich in this area due to a series of grants from the Hagop Kevorkian Fund and donations such as the personal library of noted Islamic scholar Charles K. Wilkinson whose selected acquisitions are on view in the newly reinstalled Islamic Art galleries.The Library has a collection of artists’ books, ranging from multiples to limited editions to unique works, many of which relate to the cultures represented by the Museum’s object collections. Many of the books published by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. fall into this latter category as they resonate so well with the Islamic collections here.

I first met Vincent FitzGerald and Zahra Partovi in the Dieu Donne Galleries in 1999 at an exhibition entitled Dialogues in Collaboration: the publications of Vincent FitzGerald & Co. I remember being swept off my feet by the books on view and wanted to bring some of these books into the Brooklyn Museum collection.  Both Vincent and Zahra recognized the Museum’s longstanding interest in Islamic art and knew their books would fit in well with our collections.

Through the generosity of anonymous donors and guidance from Vincent we were given nine books created by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. The books demonstrate in a beautiful way that thirteenth-century Persian poetry can be made intellectually accessible to a present-day audience. Since we acquired these books we have featured them in exhibitions such as Working in Brooklyn: Artists Books in 2000 and they have been a favorite of visiting teachers, students and artists in the Library Reading Room. Both visually challenging and intellectually stimulating, these books speak to the future of the book as a vibrant tool for communication while being works of art in themselves. The Fragments of Light series is the most recent example of innovative ways Vincent and his collaborators challenge the definition of the book.

Come visit and see these great books in person!

The Whitman Project included Associate Artistic Director Greg Trupiano; Associate Artistic Director Lon Black; Nicole Mitchell; and Hakim Williams. Both Greg and Lon read  eloquently from Whitman’s writings about witnessing the early days of the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library and the Brooklyn Institute. Their readings from “Brooklyniana,” Leaves of Grass, and Specimen Days beautifully captured Whitman’s fond memories of the sites and sounds of Brooklyn. They also read excerpts from books that were in the Library at the time Whitman was acting librarian in 1835, including titles such as The History of Printing in America by Isaiah Thomas, published in 1810, and An historical … view of the United States of America by William Winterbotham. Mezzo-soprano Nicole Mitchell graced us with her beautiful renditions of “Oh! Susannah” and “Ode,” set to the music of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Hakim Williams passionately recited Whitman’s words from his texts, including “Old Brooklyn Days” and “Brooklyniana” including a wonderful description of Francis Guy’s A Snow Scene in Brooklyn in the Olden Times which describes in detail the painting in the Brooklyn Museum collection. Mr. Hakim’s reading of “Early Typesetting Experience” by Whitman set the stage for the next part of the program which focused on a poem entitled “Pictures.”

Andrew Birsh and Davin Kuntze from Woodside Press, a traditional letterpress printing shop in The Brooklyn Navy Yard, premiered their new book featuring a poem by Walt Whitman. They created a small edition of Pictures: A Poem by Walt Whitman, which is available directly from the Press. When time allows and the inspiration is there, they publish and print fine-press editions that illuminate their capabilities with classic typography, letterpress presswork, and bookbinding by hand. The beautiful letterpress chapbook is set in Linotype Baskerville, hand-sewn and printed on Magnani Avorio paper and was designed and printed for Woodside Press by Davin Kuntze.  The book has a very magical quality—we were all convinced that Walt Whitman had been overseeing the production of the book, which matches the colors and ink that were used in the original 1927 edition. Mr. Kuntze had not seen the edition that is in the Brooklyn Museum Library collection and we were all amazed on Saturday when we got our book out to compare to the new Woodside Press edition. There is an uncanny likeness to the original!

We all agreed that Walt Whitman is still with us in spirit as he had been in the days when he lived in Brooklyn oh so long ago. A comforting thought in today’s world.  Here’s the program PDF if you’d like to see it.

Susan A. Hutchinson, Founding Museum Librarian, with William Henry Goodyear, Founding Curator of Fine Arts in the Library Reading Room circa 1910.

Since the images collected by William Henry Goodyear (1846-1923) are generating interest today we thought it would interesting to look back at Goodyear and several of his colleagues who built the Museum’s collections over the years. So let’s declare 2009 the year of looking back and learning from history. Hopefully this exercise will educate us all as we move forward and learn about each other and our cultural heritage. Who knows maybe we will end the year in a more peaceful way than we started.

Let me start with a quote from artist John La Farge to William Henry Goodyear: “You have opened the window that has been closed for centuries, and have let in the light”.

I believe that La Farge was referring to Goodyear’s intense interest in photography as a tool to document the world he saw. A Yale graduate and student at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, Goodyear devoted himself to teaching and lecturing about the history of art and architecture. After graduating from Yale in 1867, he traveled to Germany, Italy, Palestine and Syria to pursue his interest in architecture. It was in Pisa in 1870 that he began to focus on architectural details and later published in an article entitled “A Lost Art” in Scribner’s Magazine, the first of many essays he wrote about architectural refinements. Goodyear started his museum career in 1882 as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1899 came to the Brooklyn Museum as the first curatorial appointment made by the newly founded museum. At Brooklyn, Goodyear led a series of research and collecting expeditions with a mission to build an art collection. He oversaw the growth of the American, European and ancient art collections including the casts of Ancient and Renaissance sculpture as well as designing and installing exhibitions of newly acquired art.

Hall of Sculpture with Casts, circa 1904.

In addition to his curatorial mandate, Goodyear dedicated time to developing his architectural theory that historic buildings were planned with irregularities which he referred to as refinements. This study focused on architectural monuments found around the world from the Cathedral of Pisa to the temples of Egypt with stops in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey. Like his colleague Stewart Culin, founding curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, Goodyear seems to have been interested in everything and this is evidenced in his photographs of people and places around the world from a street vendor in Istanbul to the vivid depictions of the world fairs of Chicago and Paris. Goodyear recognized the importance of these fairs as an educational tool to introduce cultures from different parts of the world. He, like Culin, also saw objects at the fairs and recommended their acquisition for Brooklyn. These photographs by Alfred Percival Maudslay were exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition and collected for Brooklyn after Goodyear and Culin saw them at the fair. Indeed, Goodyear worked obsessively using photography as a tool to educate and a method to document his findings in the field in addition to his writings.

Maudslay photographs on view in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, circa 1893.

It seems that throughout his long life he developed theories that explored new themes in the history of art starting with his “Grammar of the Lotus” documenting continuing use of the lotus form in decorative art since its use in Ancient Egypt. He also wrote several popular histories of art and was one of the first to use actual photographs, as opposed to engravings, to illustrate these texts. He took and collected photographs and used them in the form of lantern slides to illustrate his many lectures–over 130 for the Brooklyn Museum alone–ranging from the art of ancient civilizations to the art of the nineteenth century. In addition to being known as an architectural historian, Goodyear was a scholar of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology with a focus on America, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of this is evidenced in the photographs (lantern slides, negatives and prints) and his research (published and unpublished) found in the Museum Libraries and Archives.

His photographs offer detailed images of historic structures before the devastation of world wars and rampant twentieth century architectural “redevelopment.” His documentation of many buildings has served as guideposts to reconstruction of several monuments that have been destroyed or renovated over the years. But his influence went beyond architecture since it was his vision that laid the groundwork for two major art museum collections–the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was responsible for recommending the acquisition of several important objects including the antiquities collection and library assembled by Charles Edwin Wilbour, America’s first Egyptologist. Goodyear also established the first children’s museum in America – the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Today we all benefit from Goodyear’s scholarship and foresight as we see the world before us through his photographs and writings.

More to come about these early visionaries in Brooklyn, but today we are honoring Professor Goodyear by releasing more images from his archives of street scenes and mosques in Turkey in response to comments on Flickr Commons.

In conjunction with this event, we have just installed several artists’ books from our collection in two display cases in and outside the Library on the second floor, so come visit the Brooklyn Museum and see these interesting books! One strength of our collection is books by Brooklyn-based artists and publishers. I’ve done some blogging on the subject in the past and this time around Lilli Schestag, our great Pratt intern, has compiled lists of Brooklyn-based book artists, galleries and presses for your reference. If you are a Brooklyn based book artist, gallery or press, let us know if you want your name added to any of these lists for future publication. Just send us an e-mail.

We would love to hear your thoughts and comments!

Left: Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. Abu Simbel [selected images]. View 05: Egypt. Abu Simbel., n.d., This slide colored by Joseph Hawkes Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 Abu Simbel, image 9491).

Right: Paris Exposition: Champ de Mars and Palace of Metallurgy, Paris, France, 1900. Exposition of 1900. General view of the Chateau de Mars taken from the Chateau d’Eau. [The Champs de Mars towards the Metallurgie Palace]. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_015 image 1945).

While the Brooklyn Museum staff is the primary user of our Libraries and Archives, we are open to the public and are always looking to reach out to a wide and varied audience. One of the challenges is ensuring everyone knows which resources we have available and listening to the needs of our visitors, so we know what to provide and how best to present these materials. One of the more interesting results of “growing” an encyclopedic collection is that we have research collections that serve as an intellectual link to the objects and perhaps act as storytellers revealing the cultural context of the objects. Think about the possible stories behind these photographs and then tag the images with the story you see. Take a look at these photographs and tell us how you would like to use them. What other materials would you like to see?

We believe that by sharing these images we will support a better understanding of the cultures that have created the great art that is held by this Museum. We hope you will agree.