Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAVIC)
Established in 2005, The Center for Historic American Visual Culture
(CHAVIC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) seeks to provide
opportunities for educators to learn about American visual culture and
resources, promote the awareness of AAS collections, and stimulate
research and intellectual inquiry into American visual materials. CHAVIC
will accomplish these goals by offering fellowships, exhibitions,
workshops and seminars, conferences, and improved access to AAS
collections.
AAS has very rich collections of visual materials including maps,
prints, photography, illustrated books and serials, and ephemera. These
collections are described in depth on the
library collections pages.
Fellowship Opportunities
Scholars interested in using AAS visual collections are encouraged
to apply to the fellowship program for funding. There are currently three
fellowships devoted to scholars using visual collections.
A gift from Jay Last, a member of the American Antiquarian Society,
and his wife, Deborah, enables the AAS Center for Historic American Visual
Culture to promote research in the Society's preeminent
collection of American graphic materials. One to three-month long
residential fellowships will be awarded for a variety of purposes, some
augmenting current AAS fellowship offerings for research by academic
scholars and by creative and performing artists preparing work for general
audiences.
Applicants are
urged to contact the Society's curator of graphic arts, Georgia Barnhill,
as soon as possible, noting that the deadline for academic fellowship
applications is January 15, 2007.
Another fellowship
is funded by the
American Historical Print Collectors Society to support
research using prints. The third fellowship, The Drawn to Art fellowship
endowed by Diana Korzenik, is for scholars using prints or studying visual
culture in broader terms. Scholars are eligible for other fellowships at
AAS as well.
In addition to underwriting fellowships for historical research using
printed visual materials, there is funding to select a group of Visual
Culture Scholars for work on projects such as researching films or
exhibitions, creating curriculum packages, enriching web-based resources,
and documenting the natural or built environment. Awards in this category
may be for projects and periods of residence that do not necessarily fall
within the criteria of the fellowships.
Creative artists wishing to use historical materials as a source
for
their art should apply to the competition for Creative and
Performing
Artists and Writers.
Conferences
CHAVIC sponsors annual conferences on its own or in
conjunction with other organizations.
The
first of these was Visualizing the
Past, a one-day conference for K-12 educators,
held in
Worcester at AAS on Friday, October 13, 2006.
In
November 2007, Fields of Vision: The
Material and
Visual Culture of New England, 1600-1830, a conference on New England
Visual and Material Culture to 1830 was
co-sponsored with the Colonial
Society of Massachusetts.
Home, School, Play, Work:
The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children
November 14-15,
2008, in Worcester, Mass., and February 13-14, 2009, in Princeton, New
Jersey
Workshops
One of the goals of the Center is to engage teachers on all levels
to make images more accessible to them and their students. We will
accomplish this with a series of workshops at AAS and elsewhere.
A four- or five-day seminar is being planned for the summer of
2007. This program will include sessions on print processes, the history
of American prints, and special topics such as political prints,
portraits, and reading race.
Exhibitions
AAS has no physical exhibition spaces, but has created several
online exhibitions in recent years. Topics in include A Woman's Work is
Never Done, Architectural
Resources at the American Antiquarian Society, the David Claypoole Johnston Collection,
Visions of Christmas, Portraits!
Worcester Portraits in the American Antiquarian Society
Collection, Making Valentines: A
Tradition in America, and Summer
Vacationing in New England. We will continue to
add to the archived online exhibitions. We seek volunteer curators to
work with the Society's staff in mounting exhibitions.
AAS has also made
a commitment to collaborate with museums or special collection libraries
in academic settings to use AAS materials in offsite exhibitions. A
selection of prints will be available through the website of the Museum
Loan Network. To pursue these possibilities, please contact Georgia B.
Barnhill, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts
(GBarnhill[at]mwa.org).
Access to AAS Collections
The online Catalogue of
American Engravings provides
detailed
information about engravings published independently and as illustrations
before 1821. One priority of the CHAVIC program will be to provide
digital images for the materials owned by AAS in this union catalog. AAS
has started to digitize the collection of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century prints. Among the genres that have been scanned to
date are religious prints, city views, portraits, architectural prints,
and historical prints. Access to these prints will be through the website
owned by David Rumsey. He already hosts the Daniel and Jessie Lie Farber
Archive of Gravestone Photographs for AAS. The Farber Collection, the
William Allen Collection of Ephemera, and a collection of ephemera
collected during the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 are
available through the OCLC/Research Libraries Group's project, the
Cultural Materials Initiative. Other collections will appear on this
site in the future.
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Fellowships
Conferences
Workshops
Exhibitions
Access to AAS Collections
The April 2007 issue
of the online journal Common-place is devoted to graphics in
nineteenth-century America.
Upcoming conferences:
The call for papers for the 2008 conference Home, School, Play, Work:
The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children
has been announced
Other Fellowship Opportunity:
The Amon Carter Museum seeks applications for the 2008-2009 Davidson
Family Fellowship. The fellowship supports a new or continuing research
project that relates to the museum's collection of American art and
photography, which includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and
illustrated books from 1835 to 1950, and photography from its beginning
to the present. Applications are due March 15, 2008.
More information, including an application form, is available at:
http://www.cartermuseum.org/ library/davidson- family-fellowship
Past conferences:
Fields of Vision: The Material and
Visual Culture of New England, 1600-1830 a two-day
conference co-sponsored by
CHAVIC and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts was held November
9-10, 2007.
Visualizing the Past: A
One-Day
Conference for K-12 Educators (October 2006)
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