Thursday, October 6, 2011
On the second floor of a building tucked behind Strong Hall, Andrew Foster, a senior from Derby, places his backpack in a metal locker. Flashing an ID at the front desk, he takes a right and enters a small room lined with bookshelves. With the help of a curator, Foster begins digging through black-and-white photos from the Civil War era.
The Spencer Museum of Art is hosting a KU campus heritage exhibit now through December. The exhibit is a collaboration between Spencer Museum of Art curators and graphic design students at KU. The exhibit focuses on Spooner Hall, Fraser Hall, Old North College, and Potter Lake.
Foster is using Spencer Research Library’s archived photos to compile a book on campus war memorials.
“The curator told me there are 1 million photos in the research library not available online, literally 1 million,” Foster said.
Foster said until he began his recent project he had no idea how far back the photo archives dated. The information is free and for $5, the library will make a publication quality copy of an image, he said.
A request form must be filled out to reproduce images for display or publishing, but copyright restrictions are not normally a problem with images of campus, said Tara Wenger, head of reader services at Spencer Research Library.
The requests are used primarily to keep track of reproductions and their usage. Images from Spencer have been hung in restaurants, published in books and displayed in homes.
A current exhibit at the Spencer Museum of Art also uses images from Spencer Research Library. “Glorious to View: The KU Campus Heritage Project” is a collaboration between Spencer Museum of Art staff and University graphic design students.
Chassica Kirchhoff, a curatorial intern at Spencer Museum of Art, said “Glorious to View” features archive images from both Spencer Museum of Art and Spencer Research Library.
“It was so hard to pick the ones for “Campus Heritage” because there are so many crazy pictures of campus,” Kirchhoff said.
Kenzie Tubbs, a senior from St. Louis, said she helped design a piece in the “Glorious to View” exhibit focused on Old North College. Old North College, originally North College Hall, was the campus’ first building, built in 1866. The site is now occupied by GSP and Corbin Residence Halls. She said her group was provided with several photos to work with by Spencer Museum of Art curators.
“It’s fascinating to look at the photos,” Tubbs said. “I didn’t even know these old images existed.”
Amanda Kilwin, a senior from St. Louis, said her work in the exhibit focuses on Potter Lake. She said she learned a lot about the history of campus and the number of images Spencer Research Library and Spencer Museum of Art hold.
“They have a huge collection,” Kilwin said. “They are not always able to show everything in the museum.”
Spencer Museum of Art holds about 38,000 works, of which only about 1 percent are on display, said Jerrye Van Leer, Spencer Museum of Art coordinator of tours and visitor services.
Kirchhoff said many of the images from Spencer Museum of Art and Spencer Research Library can be found on Luna Insight, an online collection database found on the University’s library website. Images from Spencer Museum of Art, like those of Spencer Research Library, can be reproduced for personal, academic and publication purposes, Kirchhoff said.
— Edited by Jason Bennett
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