It’s been just over a year since the University Archives first asked for your experiences related to COVID-19. Thank you to all those who responded – we’ve been slowly adding all the submissions to our Digital Collections! We have a new project aimed at the whole Wesleyan community to learn what this year has been like. … Read more
Musical instruments are designed to be played: to be hit, struck, blown, and handled by humans in a variety of ways. Over time, this repeated interaction in combination with environmental conditions can have a tangible effect. Just as with any physical object, an instrument’s material – whether wood, metal, animal skin, or other – wears down, weakens, and breaks over time. Sometimes these issues can be fixed, but in other cases the instrument is beyond repair.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Lace, ca. 1845. This image of lace is an example of a calotype, an early photographic technique. William Henry Fox Talbot, the author of this work, invented the calotype in 1841 as a competing medium to the daguerreotype, another early photographic technique, in which an image imprinted on thin metal. To … Read more
Like an archaeological excavation through layers of what has been left behind, this series of artist’s books digs deep to create beauty amid decay and loss. Each of the ten titles (so far) in the Stratigraphic Archives is a new exploration of remnants of the past.
This month marks thirty years since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA. NAGPRA is a federal law that protects Native American graves and funerary objects. It also provides a process by which museums and agencies must repatriate Native American human remains, funerary objects, and certain categories of cultural objects to lineal descendants, Native American tribes, and Native Hawaiian Organizations.
On November 16, 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This important human rights legislation aimed to restore dignity and respect to the ancestral human remains and cultural objects being held in museum collections, and provided a process for their repatriation to culturally affiliated tribes, lineal descendants, and Native Hawaiian … Read more
I have always been astonished at the beautiful, colorful Ukiyo-e prints in the Davison Art Center’s collection. Ukiyo-e prints, or “pictures from the floating world,” were produced during the Edo Period in Japan (1603–1868 CE). Utagawa Yoshitora (1798–1861) worked during the late Edo Period and is known for his vivid imagination and his eclectic depictions … Read more
October 27th might not strike you as a particularly special date, but for audiovisual archivists around the world it certainly is. World Day for Audiovisual Heritage–proclaimed in 2005 by the United Nations and celebrated every October 27th since –is a day of awareness for the vast, fragile historical and cultural record captured on audio, video, … Read more
Wesleyan’s Davison Art Center has an extensive collection of prints by British artist and satirist William Hogarth (1697–1764). Hogarth’s prints are visually complex, with each intricate detail a pointed commentary on eighteenth-century British society. Hogarth’s frank and bawdy prints were often produced in series and can be read both as a history of British society … Read more
Welcome to Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of our freedom to read diversely and without censorship! Every year books are challenged and even banned in American libraries, schools, and even universities. In 2019 alone, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked over 350 challenges to titles held in libraries across the nation, … Read more
