“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit our collections. Below is a blog by Abbie Steuhm from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0001).
Private Catholic: Zines for Catholic School Kids
By Abbie Steuhm
In the U.S. education system, private schools are unique as scholarly institutions that stand outside of government funding and therefore government regulations. Catholic private schools in particular mix religion and education for young students. While there is a lot of debate around these schools, we find ourselves knowing little about the stories and thoughts of the students themselves who attend. However, some of these stories are told within the minor-league zine Private Catholic found within the Sarah and Jen Wolfe Zines Collection (MsC0878) held in the University of Iowa’s Special Collections & Archives.
“Zines” are handmade booklets self-published by a variety of people, usually members of alternative subcultures. Due to the accessibility of self-publishing and lack of mainstream censorship, many zines detail deeply personal experiences relating to issues of misogyny, classism, racism, anarchism, and empowerment. This makes zines rather difficult to collect and showcase to a wide audience, since these stories were meant to be seen by a small group of collectors and self-publishers instead of an entire academic institution. However, the University of Iowa Libraries staff—many of whom are part of the zine subculture—are dedicated to preserving this small history. This allows stories from unheard voices like Catholic students to be read and experienced by researchers today.
The unnamed creator of the Private Catholic zine gave their personal statement in the first issue, starting with an all-caps statement “OK, LET’S BOND.” They continue by saying they had “originally intended this zine to be a handbook… for poor souls like me who are stuck in Private Catholic school—and trust me, it is HELL” (Private Catholic, no. 1). While the average reader may take this statement as an intense dislike for private Catholic schools, the author explicitly states in issue two how they are “not decidedly for or against Private Catholic schools… They can be pretty cool (uniform means you don’t have to worry what to wear), etc.” Private Catholic allows teenage Catholic school-goers a place to vent their frustrations and air some outrageous stories. For example, underneath the “True Stories” section of the zine’s first edition, someone named Gina tells her single-sentence story of how she received detention for, quote, “being bad at volleyball.”
Author Note found in Private Catholic
Private Catholic earns its place within the zine subculture as it details narratives that go against the strict grain of private Catholic schools. In the first issue, one contributor talks about how the spelling book Wordly Wise “introduces and incorporates alternative philosophies and lifestyles” besides an image of Alice from Alice in Wonderland surrounded by definitions of various words such as “anarchy” and “funeral.” Within the same issue, a two-page spread of cut-and-paste pictures from popular magazines displays various images of girls posing in Catholic school uniforms. The commentary on these pages tells how those magazines were selling the look of a Catholic school girl as “sexy, alternative” despite how students were conforming to authoritarian standards with those uniforms.
Both current and former students cognizant and articulate difficult topics that even adults find trouble voicing at times. This is the reason zines deserve their space within Special Collections & Archives; the original, unedited thoughts of underrepresented groups, minorities, and the youth of the past are scissored, glued and typed in various, abstract ways into self-published magazines, a feat worthy of preservation and admiration from fellow students who made their way from Catholic school to public university.
Wordly Wise page layoutSchool Girls Comic
Further Reading:
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Piepmeier (2009)
Stolen Sharpie Revolution by Alex Wrekk (2014)
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe (1997)
“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit our collections. Below is a blog by Luke Allan from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0001).
Poems That Just Are
By Luke Allan
FIG 1: Ian Hamilton Finlay with his poem acrobats on the wall of his house in 1965. Photo by Jonathan Williams
In a letter to a friend in the late 1950s, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) admits to feeling that he must be “about the only contemporary writer who believes that the purpose of art is to—oh dearie me, I forget exactly what—let’s say: be beautiful.” Finlay is in his early thirties, living alone on a remote Scottish island, recovering from the collapse of his marriage, struggling with his mental health problems, and desperately poor. In 1959 he’ll move to Edinburgh, and from there to a dilapidated farmhouse in the Highlands. In the meantime he’ll meet his second wife, Sue, and in 1966 the young couple will move into a slightly less dilapidated farmhouse in the Pentland Hills, called Stonypath, and have their first child. For the next fifty years Ian and Sue will transform Stonypath, and the square acre of wilderness it sits on, nicknamed Little Sparta, into a unique “poem garden”, cultivated by the world’s first self-proclaimed “avant-gardeners”.
But let us take a step back. At some point in those years between moving to the city and leaving it again with Sue, Ian meets Paul Pond and Jessie McGuffie, and together they start a small poetry magazine, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. The title is borrowed from a Robert Creeley poem, “Please”, and this borrowing itself hints at one of the motivations behind Ian’s interest in running a magazine: the wish to establish a community of likeminded poets and friends. In the mid-sixties Ian was diagnosed with agoraphobia, an event that, if nothing else, gave a name to the feelings of anxiety and alienation that had troubled him for many years, and which fenced him off from the world. Running a magazine would be, whatever else it would be, a way of having friendships in exile.
Editing POTH took Finlay on a long journey into the contemporary poetic avant-garde that would radically reorient his own writing. He already sensed that he no longer cared for poems that were merely “about” things, that he wanted instead poems “that just are” (letter to Gael Turnbull, 29 April 1963). But it was his encounter with the work of the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos in winter 1962, while editing issue 6 of POTH, that lit the fuse for Finlay. De Campos’s poems were concretos—concrete. They demonstrated a way of thinking and writing that short-circuited traditional logical and grammatical structures. Feeling alienated from the “ordinary syntax” of “social reality”, as he put it in a letter to Jerome Rothenberg in 1963, Finlay found in concrete poetry a mode of thinking and writing that freed him from the grammar of a world he didn’t recognize as his own: concrete poetry became, for Finlay, “a model of order” within a world “full of doubt” (letter to Pierre Garnier, 17 September 1963). The encounter is crucial for Finlay. In POTH 8 (1963) Finlay publishes his first concrete poem, “Homage to Malevich”, and over the next five years he produces some of his greatest hits, including “acrobats” (1964) and “wave/rock” (1966). Much as Finlay used the magazine to establish a safe social space inside a larger, unstable world, so the concrete poem served as a microcosm of stillness and clarity within the disorder of modern life.
The poem-object shown in the images below is a calendar. Published in 1968, it collects twelve of Finlay’s early concrete poems, and is his first real encounter with a US readership. The calendar’s title, The Blue and the Brown Poems, is a reference to Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books, transcriptions of lecture notes in which the philosopher first develops his destabilizing ideas about the relationship between words and meanings. The calendar is larger than you might think: at 20 inches tall, it’s probably too big for your fridge door or the space beside your desk. It asks, unusually for a calendar, for a more monumental setting, hung on a large wall like a framed painting or poster.
The calendar begins, also unusually, in September. This may be a reference to the calendar of the Roman Empire, in which case it’s an early example of Finlay’s interest in classical culture, a central theme of his later work. Each month features a concrete poem printed in color on white paper, accompanied by a short commentary by the critic Stephen Bann.
FIG 2: The title page of The Blue and the Brown PoemsFIG 3: ‘acrobats’ (January). This is the same poem seen in the background of the photo at the top of this blog post, an example of the way Finlay reiterated his poems in different ways throughout his career—on walls, in print, in stone, and in glass, as well as in various contexts: in the home, in books, in galleries, and in public spaces.
Finlay believed that concrete poems were for contemplating, so it followed that their ideal presentation was in a place where they could be readily contemplated. The calendar, like the wall or the garden, is a quintessentially Finlayian form. It is a way to turn the poem into something we can live around or within. Underpinning these considerations of form and space is a more fundamental belief in the relationship between poetry and ordinary experience: the calendar is a bridge between the heavens of literary culture and the ovens of real life in the home.
In ‘wave/rock’, the words “wave” and “rock” bear the colors of the sea and the land, and where the two words overlap there is a sonic collision that produces the “wrack”—seaweed washed up on the shore. Visually, the superimposed blue and brown letterforms give an impression of seaweed-covered rocks. A “wrack” is also a wrecked ship, the word suggesting sudden violent damage, and as these two words collide the wreckage miraculously takes on the form of a word for wreckage. In this sense the poem borrows the kind of forces found at sea as metaphors for the kinds of forces found in language.
FIG 4: “wave/rock” (February) The poem was first realized as a glass poem-object in 1966 (pictured here) and later exhibited as a sculpture in a park in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1969. It was also printed across a page spread in the magazine Aspen. Later still it was realized as a fabric wall hanging
Finlay started out as a writer of short stories and plays. In the middle of his life he found concrete poetry, and he set out on a journey into small-press publishing that would serve as his primary medium of friendship. In the final third of his life he realized the full potential of the concrete poem as a part of a landscape. Later, Finlay disassociated himself from concrete as a movement, because he felt that it did not share his views on the important function of tradition within the avant-garde. Today it is his garden domain, Little Sparta, for which he is best remembered, but at one level the garden is only the final manifestation of a poetic impulse to make enclosures that characterized Finlay’s oeuvre. The social enclosure of the magazine and the press, the aesthetic enclose of the concrete poem, and the physical and philosophical enclosure of the garden: these were ways of dealing with a sickness Finlay had diagnosed in the world and for which he spent his life discovering—oh dearie me, I forget exactly what—let’s say: beautiful cures.
FIG 5: “you / me” (April). The yellow of “you” and the blue of “me” combine to make the compound green of “us”. The two colors then separate again, continuing on a path that is at once shared and separate, on which they are, so to speak, alone together. The metaphor of color—one crucial to Wittgenstein too, we should remember—reminds us that relationships, like compound colors, are more than the sum of their parts. Blue and yellow make something unique, called green, that was in neither, and that cannot be kept if the colors are separated back out.
* * *
When the University of Iowa acquired The Sackner Archive in 2019, work began to unpack and classify the 75,000 works of visual and concrete poetry that Ruth and Marvin Sackner had collected over the course of their lives. Ruth Sackner passed away in 2015, and Marvin Sackner joined her just a few weeks after the Archive’s inaugural exhibition, in September 2019. The work required to process the many books, prints, periodicals, letters, and objects that make up their enormous collection continues behind the scenes, and items from the archive are currently available to view by special request. Over time, the archive will be fully integrated into ArchivesSpace, but even now it is possible to browse the archive here.
Over the course of forty years Finlay published more than a thousand books, booklets, cards, prints and poem-objects, many through his publishing imprint Wild Hawthorn Press. It’s clear that Ruth and Marvin Sackner were enormous fans of Finlay’s work, because their collection contains several hundred of these publications. It’s a rich seam, and one that is still largely unexplored.
FURTHER READING
In print:
Yves Abrioux and Stephen Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 1985; 2nd edition, revised and expanded, 1994)
A Model of Order: Selected Letters for Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Thomas A Clark (Glasgow: Wax366, 2009)
Patrick Eyres, “Gardens of Exile”, New Arcadian Journal 10 (1983)
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections, ed. Alec Finlay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)
Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alec Finlay (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995)
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Rapel: 10 Fauve and Suprematist Poems (Edinburgh: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1963)
John Dixon Hunt, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)
Caitlin Murray and Tim Johnson, eds., The Present Order: Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Marfa, TX: Marfa Book Company, 2011)
Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Photographs by Andrew Lawson (London: Frances Lincoln, 2003)
Online:
Carli Teproff, “A force on the Miami art scene, Ruth Sackner dies at 79”, Miami Herald, October 12, 2015. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/obituaries/article38777727.html
Andres Viglucci, “Marvin Sackner, a physician, inventor and renowned collector of word art, has died”, Miami Herald, September 30, 2020 https://www.miamiherald.com/article246121525.html?fbclid=IwAR1Tur1UbivcjHp3HaTx6AN2r8KJNNYXIcdFQc0meVeUXPieXJvQYhuUEJ8
Padded Cell Pictures, Concrete! (documentary about Marvin and Ruth Sackner) https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/1004581/uiconf_id/15920232/entry_id/1_bv84gwjw/embed/dynamic?
The following is written by Community and Student Life Archivist Aiden Bettine
The University Archives is embarking on a new, hands-on project to collect the history of student organizations on our campus, Student Organizations Archiving their Records or SOAR. The Purpose of SOAR is to ensure that the legacy of each student organization on the University of Iowa campus is being actively preserved. This project provides student organizations with archiving kits for their materials so they can engage in the archival process. Involving students in the organization, description, and care for their organization’s archival collection is an integral part of making the history of student organizations visible on our campus. Organization leaders will work closely with our Community & Student Life Archivist, Aiden Bettine, to ensure their collections move into the University Archives.
Students are an integral part of our campus history. One of the primary ways that students make an impact on our campus is through student organizations whether as founders, members, or leaders. Yet a challenge with collecting this history is the reality that leadership and organizational records change hands every couple of years. Through SOAR, our goal is that when a student organization has a leadership change, the awareness of being able to work closely with the University Archives is passed down.
Although the organizational records will vary from group to group, there are some consistent types of materials we collect to capture the history of an organization:
Constitution/Bylaws
Meeting minutes/notes
Event flyers/posters
Marketing materials
Correspondence/email
Newsletters/publications
Annual financial budgets
Handbooks
Petitions
Photographs/videos
T-shirts, buttons, stickers, etc.
Website
Whether physical or digital versions of materials, the University Archives is ready to help preserve your organization’s history on our campus.
For student organizations that are affiliated with a center, office, or department on campus, SOAR offers the opportunity for archival storage outside of the University Archives in another campus space. This affords students the opportunity to keep their records close to where they gather regularly for ease of access and use. Storing materials on campus but outside of the Main Library also invites library patrons to learn more about an organization in context, to understand how institutional spaces for student organizations function on campus.
The University Archives is here to support the preservation and accessibility of each student organization’s history, regardless of where the materials are stored on our campus. We will work directly with each group to ensure the best decisions are made for the preservation and use of their collection. We want all our Hawkeyes to SOAR! To learn more about SOAR visit here.
Are you part of a student org and want to get involved in preserving your org’s history? Fill out the SOAR participation survey to tell us more about the materials you have.
The following is written by Elizabeth Riordan and Anna Holland for Silent-ology‘s Buster Keaton Blogathon
Sitting in a dark auditorium in Iola, Kansas, two friends watched Our Hospitality with a live band accompaniment. The annual Buster Keaton Celebration had begun, and the audience around them clapped and cheered as the screen illuminated Keaton donning his signature pork pie hat. The utter glee of watching the antics of this silent cinema star filled the room almost a century later.
But there lies the magic of Buster Keaton. Time may pass, but Keaton’s stunts and storytelling continue to intrigue audiences, old and young alike. Associate Curator of Iowa Women’s Archives Anna Holland and Lead Instruction and Outreach Librarian Elizabeth Riordan sat in that auditorium back in 2012, partaking in the Keaton Celebration. Neither one realized that they would soon be working in the archives that held the research files of Marion Meade, Buster Keaton biographer.
Meade undertook the monumental task of capturing the life of Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton for a biography on the actor. She had already made a name for herself in the literary world with a series of feminist-themed novels and had broken into the biography scene in 1988 with a book on American poet Dorothy Parker. By the mid 1990s, she was ready to discover what was under the “Great Stone Face.”
Mock up for front cover for Cut to the Chase book
Buster Keaton – Cut to the Chase by Marion Meade hit bookstores in 1995 nearly 30 years after Keaton’s death. Published on the 100th anniversary of Keaton’s birth, it aimed to underline his cinematic legacy with a definitive biography and introduce him to a new generation of cinephiles who may not have gotten a hold of a VHS copy of The Navigator or encountered his 1960 autobiography. Since its release, the book has received critiques for its sometimes-harsh take on Buster’s early life, as well as a general lack of objectivity. Despite critiques, the book still holds sway, with rumors that it will soon be turned into a film with 20th Century Studios.
Meade’s chapters are reminiscent of silent film shorts, barely any exceed 20 pages, making Keaton’s life easily digestible. She sets scenes artistically, and engagingly. Meade introduces Keaton by transplanting us in a noisy, cold Times Square before describing a 21-year-old who “looks younger, with a solemn, pretty-boy face and a shock of straight dark hair” (Meade, 1). After setting the mood, she takes a deep dive into the history of Keaton’s family and then on a step-by-step journey through his life and career. The book gives ample attention, and several pages of photographs, to the joys and scandals in his personal life along with his films.
Tape of interview with Eleanor Keaton
Despite its shortcomings, Meade’s meticulous research is evident throughout the book. Not only did she dig into details like Keaton genealogy, but Meade also held dozens of interviews. She went out to gather oral histories with family, friends, and colleagues of Keaton. Tapes and tapes of interviews soon stacked up, including interviews with Keaton’s third wife Eleanor, his son John, and those who worked behind the scenes on his famous film The General. Meade took advantage of something biographers today can only dream of: still-living vaudevillians, actors from the golden age of Hollywood, and members of Keaton’s own family who all told detailed stories of their lives and Keaton’s. These interviews, doggedly pursued by Meade, are perhaps the most important and lasting contribution of Cut to the Chase.
Meade’s research and interviews on Buster Keaton were bought by the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & Archives, along with her work on Woody Allen, Nathanael West, and Eileen McKenney. Meade’s papers are open to researchers, or simply the curious public, and anyone can find out more about what is in the collection by exploring the online finding aid here.
For Keaton fans Elizabeth and Anna, using this collection at work has been a dream come true, but anyone can access these research files. For those of you interested in following in the research footsteps of Marion Meade, contact UI Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives , and we’ll walk you through visiting the collections.
Elizabeth Riordan enjoying Buster Keaton’s AutobiographyAnna Holland strikes a pose with Buster at Muskegon Lake
The following is written by Kathryn Reuter, Academic Outreach Coordinator for Special Collections & Archives and for Stanley Museum of Art
In 1938, Chester Carlson invented the process of electrophotographic printing. Later rebranded as xerography, this process is what fuels photocopy machines around the world. Carlson’s invention forever changed the nature of office work and schoolwork, but it also sparked creativity for artists around the globe. While many of us associate the Xerox machine with the monotony of paper pushing and working nine to five under office florescent lights, members of the International Society of Copier Artists (I.S.C.A.) saw the copy machine as an artist’s medium and eagerly embraced the possibilities of this tool.
Neaderland with her cat Muffin, International Society of Copier Artists Records (MsC0768)
Louise Neaderland founded the I.S.C.A. in 1981 as “a non-profit professional organization composed of artists who use the copier both alone and in conjunction with other medium to create prints, murals, billboards, postcards and an innovative array of bookworks.” (I.S.C.A. Quarterly vol. 1 no.1, 1982) Neaderland is a printmaker, book artist, and alum of Bard College and the University of Iowa. Beginning in the early 1980s, her New York City studio became a hub of copier artist activity. Rather than gathering and sharing their work in person, artists corresponded with Neaderland primarily through the postal system. In addition to artists, membership in the I.S.C.A. was open to art collectors and institutions like libraries and archives.
At the core of the I.S.C.A. was the I.S.C.A. Quarterly, a publication of work by member artists. Neaderland published the first volume of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly in April of 1982, and aside from the occasional guest editor, it appears that the operation was largely a one-woman show. Artists would mail copies of their work to Neaderland, who would organize the submissions and publish the pieces in the Quarterly. Then she would package and mail each issue to I.S.C.A. members and subscribers.
The first issue of the Quarterly contained the work of all 48 copier artist members and was released as a file of loose papers in a flat folder. By the third issue, the Quarterly had grown to over 120 members and had found its form as a plastic comb bound volume of pages, a format it would (mostly) maintain until the final issue in June of 2004.
Vol. 16 No. 1 (1997) folded pages by Susan Gold
Copier artists creatively stretch the expectations of photocopies by using different colors, sizes, and textures of paper. In issues of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly there are works that have pasted on collages, unique paper cut-outs, applied paint, ink, and sewed on appliques. So long as an artist was using a photocopier as a component of their work, their pieces were fair game for submission to the Quarterly. While some issues were a hodgepodge of works with vastly different subject matter, Neaderland frequently issued calls for work based on a theme, resulting in I.S.C.A. Quarterly issues on “Statues of Liberty”, “Walls”, “The Artist’s Studio”, and “Charles Dickens”, just as a few examples.
In the summer of 1986, Neaderland published the first of what would become an annual issue of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly: the Bookworks edition. The Bookworks issues featured xerographic artists books and book objects and were packaged in cardboard box mailers. Printed on the back of the catalogue for the first Bookworks edition are the opening lines of Ulises Carrion’s essay “What A Book Is”:
A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments. A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words. A writer, contrary to popular opinion, does not write books. A writer writes texts.
This series of statements makes clear that the Bookworks editions of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly were meant to challenge our notions of what makes a book.
Items from the first annual Bookworks edition – including a matchbook
Because they corresponded and submitted art through the mail, the I.S.C.A. was undoubtedly embedded in the “Eternal Network”. Dating back to the 1950s and still active today, the Network is an informal, global network of artists who communicate by exchanging their mail art via the postal system. Postage stamps, envelopes, and other postal themes frequently appeared in the work of I.S.C.A. members.
Like the Network, the I.S.C.A. was truly international in scope, in Neaderland’s files of correspondence with other artists, there is mail from Japan, Greece, Panama, Spain, Uruguay, and what was formally Czechoslovakia and West Germany. Neaderlander must have gotten quite a lot of mail; in her Editorial Letter from December 1995, Neaderland urges fellow I.S.C.A. members to send packages to a separate mailing address instead of to her Brooklyn address because she had “a small mailbox here in Brooklyn, and a very angry postman.”
Sitting at the intersection of book works and mail art, the work of the I.S.C.A. attracted the attention of Ruth and Marvin Sackner: a Miami based couple who became leading collectors of concrete poetry, artist books, and book objects. When the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry arrived at the University of Iowa in 2019, their issues of the I.S.C.A. Bookworks editions, which Neaderland had mailed out to Miami over the course of over two decades, were shelved just five rows away from Neaderland’s own personal copies of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly, which had never left New York City until she gifted her records to Special Collections and Archives in 2003.
Cover of Vol. 17 No. 1 (which followed a postage theme) Emma Goldman artistamps by Magda Lagerwerf, from Vol.17, No.1Katie Bronson, Vol. 21 No. 1 & 2 (2002)
The records of the International Society of Copier Artists are in good company here in Iowa City with the thousands of pieces of mail art in the ATCA, Fluxus, and Sackner collections. The I.S.C.A. Quarterlies and Bookworks editions are truly delightful to page though. They serve as records of how copier artists responded to major political, environmental, and social issues of their time. In addition, they are reflections of the rapidly changing technology of the 90s and early aughts. For instance, in 1995 Neaderland wrote in her editorial letter that she would soon be purchasing her first personal computer and was excited to not have to literally cut and paste her letters from typewritten pages. Two years later, she had established an email address for the I.S.C.A. and was working on a web site. At their core, though, the I.S.C.A. Quarterlies are a testament to artist’s abilities to find creativity and inspiration within the drudgery of the ordinary, like copy machines – and the twenty-one-year run of the Quarterly serves as a shining example of the radical power of self-publishing.
He’s served as the University of Iowa’s institutional memory for the last 21 years, which includes writing the beloved Old Gold series. Now, University Archivist David McCartney is starting a new chapter.
McCartney, who is retiring on March 1, has been dedicated to ensuring access to Iowa’s history and also highlighting voices that are underrepresented in the University Archives. Throughout his career, McCartney also developed relationships across campus, working with classes or faculty in every department, as well as with many different people throughout the state, region, and beyond.
“David has tied together research questions and historical threads across campus, from the College of Medicine to the School of Art and Art History. He has such a passion for constantly learning more about the people and events represented in our collections and for uniting materials with those who need them,” said Margaret Gamm, director of Special Collections & Archives in the University of Iowa Libraries.
After publishing an award-winning article on the life of UI student Stephen Smith, a young man from Marion, Iowa, who found his voice through civil rights activism in the 1960s, McCartney organized the Historical Iowa Civil Rights Network to bring together related repositories and collections from across the state. He also established the Stephen Lynn Smith Memorial Scholarship for Social Justice. David has served as a consultant for many smaller archives and libraries throughout the Midwest, and volunteers much of his time with smaller nonprofit organizations. In addition, McCartney received the 2020 Staff Excellence Award from the Board of Regents, State of Iowa. He’s also held many positions in the Midwest Archives Conference, including president, and made invaluable contributions to the Big Ten Academic Alliance University Archivist Group and the Consortium of Iowa Archivists.
Throughout his time at the University of Iowa, McCartney has proven to be not only a leader in his field, but an advocate for growing the archives to include the many voices that make up Hawkeye history, as demonstrated in the current Main Library Gallery Exhibit “We Are Hawkeyes: Celebrating 175 Years of Student Life at the University of Iowa.” Curated by McCartney, along with Denise Anderson and Aiden Bettine, the exhibit is a fitting final showcase of McCartney’s work of collecting and lifting all voices to be heard.
“David’s contributions and dedication during his time serving as university archivist are unmatched,” said John Culshaw, Jack B. King University Librarian. “We wish him well and know that current and future generations will continue to benefit from his preservation of university history.”
University Libraries is now reviewing applications for the university archivist position and would like to have someone begin serving in the role in the next several months.
“Duke” Slater at University of Iowa, 1920s (Fredrick W. Kent Photograph Collection, RG30.0001.001)
The following is written by Olson Graduate Research Assistant Matrice Young
Frederick Wayman “Duke” Slater was born in 1898 in Normal, IL to George and Letha Slater. Slater’s first experience playing football came on the streets of the Southside of Chicago, playing pick-up games with the neighborhood kids. During their time playing, Slater discovered a love for tackling, while many of the other kids in the neighborhood much preferred carrying the ball. As such, Slater always had a spot as a lineman in the games he played as a child.
When Slater was 13, his father, who was a nationally recognized Black Methodist minister, moved his family to Clinton, IA to become the pastor of the A.M.E. church. When Slater became a freshman at Clinton High School, he told his father he wanted to play football. His father forbade it, feeling that football was dangerous.
Slater, however, didn’t really take no for an answer. He secretly joined his high school’s football team during the summer leading into his sophomore year.
Slater’s father discovered his son’s football career when he came home one day and saw his wife, Slater’s stepmom, sewing and repairing a uniform that Slater had inherited. Slater’s father told his son to quit. Instead, Slater went on a hunger strike in protest, which lasted several days. Eventually, his father relented and gave Slater the condition that he be careful when he played, that he did his best to avoid getting hurt. With that in mind, Slater often hid his injuries instead of talking about them.
After Slater joined the Clinton Football team in 1913, he was faced with a tough choice: helmet or shoes. During this time, students had to pay for their own football equipment, and that left lower-income and poor families stranded. Slater’s family was no different. He was the oldest of six children, and had to pick between a helmet, or shoes that had to be custom made to fit him. Slater picked the shoes, which, given his 14 ½ FF size, would’ve likely been harder to find, or play without. Though after he’d picked the shoes, Slater went his entire high school and most of his college career playing without a helmet.
Slater attended the University of Iowa for his undergraduate career and was involved in a variety of extracurriculars including track, an all-Black Fraternity: Kappa Alpha Psi, and of course football.
Slater’s career at University of Iowa held many accomplishments: he was the first Black All-American football player, one of the inaugural class members of the College Football Hall of Fame, and in 1946, he was selected on “an all-time college football All-American team” by a panel of nationwide voters.
One of his biggest accomplishments on the Hawkeyes football team, however, was his play on the field versus Notre Dame. Hawkeyes ruined Notre Dame’s 20 game win streak, and Slater’s helmetless form is not only featured in the forefront of this famous picture but is also now immortalized as a statue at Kinnick Stadium.
Duke Slater blocking Notre Dame line, The University of Iowa, October 8, 1921 (Fredrick W. Kent Collection of Photographs, RG30.0001.001)
After Iowa, Slater joined the NFL’s Rock Island Independents in 1922, where he became the first African American lineman in the NFL, briefly played for the NFL’s Milwaukee Badgers (only for two games), came back to the Independents, and then after the Independents went bankrupt, Slater played for the Chicago Cardinals. By the late 1920s, the NFL was going to ban Black players, but Slater’s reputation as the best lineman in the game held the NFL at bay. Slater was one of the few African American players in the NFL during the late 1920s, and depending on the year the only African American player on the field. He was also named all-pro from 1923-1930 and was the first NFL lineman to make all-pro teams for seven different seasons. Slater’s presence in the NFL delayed the implementation of the color ban until he retired in 1931.
After his retirement, Slater still took part in sports, however, it was more on the lines of being a social justice advocate for Black Americans. He was the head coach of the Chicago Negro All-Stars in 1933, the Chicago Bombers in 1937, the Chicago Comets in 1939 and the Chicago Panthers in 1940. When the NFL banned Black players in 1934, Slater coached the barnstorming teams that had Black players to fight against the color ban. His fight for representation didn’t end with sports either, it also transferred into his law career.
While playing for the NFL, Slater attended the University of Iowa for law school. He received his degree and passed the bar exam in 1928, then began his professional law career while playing for the Chicago Cardinals.
Slater started his practice on the South Side of Chicago and became an assistant district attorney and the assistant Illinois commerce commissioner. In 1948, Slater became Chicago’s second Black-American elected judge on the Cook County Municipal Court. In another great feat, in 1960, Slater was the first Black judge to be appointed to Chicago Superior Court, which was the highest court in the city during that time. In 1964, Slater left the Superior Court to help the newly created Circuit Court of Cook County. Slater’s career as a judge, while not as largely documented, was a push against stereotypes against Black individuals, particularly Black athletes. His almost two-decade career as a respected judge on the South Side of Chicago proved that not only could Black athletes succeed, but that they weren’t unintelligent as well.
Judge Roger Kiley, who played at Notre Dame; Judge Fred W. Slater, who played at Iowa; Judge Norman C. Barry, another Notre Dame man; and Judge Robert Dunne, who played at Michigan, pose in a photo on Dec. 7, 1959. (Image by Harold Norman from Chicago Tribune )
In 1966, Judge Slater passed away from stomach cancer. He was buried at Mt. Glenwood Memorial Gardens in Greenwood IL, a historic cemetery where many prominent Black Americans were buried. To honor him, in 1972, the University of Iowa renamed their newest residency hall on campus from Rienow II to Slater Hall. Still, Slater’s story and accomplishments are swept away in the tide of history, and so University of Iowa honored him again in 2019 by erecting a relief of the famous picture from the Notre Dame game, placing it at the North End Zone of Kinnick Stadium. In early 2021, the playing field at the Kinnick Stadium was named Duke Slater Field.
Duke Slater was not just a football star, he was an advocate for Black Americans, a loving brother and uncle, a respected and highly regarded judge, and according to his niece, Hoskin Wilkins, “A man of character.”
You can learn more about Judge Slater’s football career at the University of Iowa through the book Slater of Iowa in our University Archives, and more on his life afterwards through his vertical file.
The following was written by Camille Davis, curatorial assistant to Dr. Eric Ensley
Jacques Auguste de Thou (8 October 1553, Paris – 7 May 1617, Paris), also known by his Latin name, Thuanus, was a French historian and president of the Parliament of Paris. He was also the key negotiator in the Edict of Nantes with the French Huegonots. In special collections libraries, he is known by his distinct provenance bindings that leave a trail of his history throughout the stacks.
While he inherited his father’s library in 1583, de Thou was also known to be an avid book collector himself. Unlike other collectors, his books have three distinct decorative styles that inform us of when in his life he acquired these books. As the Conservation Online databasenotes, “many of [de Thou’s] books were simply bound in red, olive, or citron colored morocco, with plain boards, a few border lines in gilt, and his coat of arms in the center of the upper cover, surrounded by laurel branches, but with only the title and his cipher on the spine” (“Jacques Auguste de Thou”). This distinctive style makes his bindings particularly easy to spot when pulling from the stacks. The first binding style is simply his coat of arms: argent, a chevron between three sable flies, and his initials. We know that he had these books bound when he was a bachelor as his other two bindings were always ciphers of his coat of arms and initials. When he was married to his first wife, Marie Barbançon, the provenance bindings seamlessly integrate his sable fly insignia with her triple lion coat-of-arms. A cipher of their initials also appears at the bottom of this gilt binding (Fig.1). After she dies and he is remarried to Gasparde de la Chastre, he will once more ask for his custom bindings to represent their shared coat of arms. After his death, his son, François Auguste de Thou would continue to have books bound with this final cipher. This moving tribute to both of his parents also can make it difficult to discern which of the De Thous had the book bound.
Typically, these coats of arms are gilt and are on plain brown calf bindings that have minimal tooling. However, the British Library, specifically, has many particularly interesting bindings that had belonged to de Thou. Karen Limper-Herz, binding expert and the curator of incunabula at the British Library, has previously discussed how de Thou, as a bachelor, had several lovely green and gold gilt fanfare bindings made for him as a bachelor. Another book in the British Library’s holdings that is distinctly different than his later bindings is a painted goatskin binding that was bound for de Thou during his marriage with his second wife, Gasparde de la Chastre.
Fig 2. showing coat of arms of de Thou and his first wife Marie Barbançon, with conjoint monogram “I A M” below. Image from Camille Davis, Special Collections & Archives
During the time that we have been recataloging the 16th century books at the University of Iowa Special Collections & Archives, we have spotted at least one of de Thou’s bindings and we certainly expect that there are more yet to be discovered in the stacks. The binding that was spotted was from the time when de Thou was married to his first wife, Marie Barbançon. As is typical for de Thou’s bindings, a laurel wreath surrounds their insignias (Fig. 2). Above the combined coats-of-arms, there is a ribbon that says “Jac August Thaunus.” In the center of the coats-of-arms is a cipher of the combined “IAT” (the “I” being a replacement for “J” at the time) and “M” so that both spouses are represented.
Fascinatingly, this book is a copy of letters to and responses from John Calvin as well as “several letters from distinguished men in the church of God” (or, as the title actually is in Latin, “Ioannis Calvini Epistolae et responsa: quibus interiectae sunt insignium in ecclesia Dei virorum aliquot etiam epistolae,” FOLIO BX9420 .A5). Since we know that this book was in de Thou’s possession, it gives further proof of how he was actively reading the work of the major Protestant minds of the time so that he might be able to work with them on behalf of the French government. If it were ever possible, it would be compelling to see a full compendium of the works in his library so that more could be known about which works de Thou thought were the most relevant to his time, his life and his work.
It is likely that the University of Iowa has more of de Thou’s bindings within their stacks. After de Thou’s death, his collection of 13,000 books became the property of Jean-Jacques Charron before they were sold off in 1789. Since that time, these books have found happy homes in many special collection stacks. However, unless a library is particularly attuned to those researchers who wish to search library catalogs for bindings and provenance, like the British Library or the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, then it can be particularly hard to find these bindings. Another interesting future digital humanities project would be to follow where all of de Thou’s books ended up; especially if a significant portion ended up in publicly accessible holdings. Then we would be able to piece together a more complete portrait of what books this significant bibliophile, statesman and historian of the 16th century found to be the most valuable books both for his own edification and for his writing. It would have significant implications for the book trade of the time. But, until such a project could happen, we will have to keep one eye open for this unique cipher that winks at us whenever we pass through the stacks.
Works Cited
“Thou, Jacques Auguste De ( 1553-1617 ).” [CoOL], https://cool.culturalheritage.org/don/dt/dt3491.html.
Special Collections & Archives recently acquired two artists books from Monica Ong, a second generation Chinese-Filipino American woman born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Her family history, like many Americans, is a complex one. During World War II, her grandparents left Fujian, China and immigrated to Manila in the Philippines. There, both of her parents were born and raised. Her father, a medical resident, moved to the US in the early 1970s with his family to settle down.
Ong studied studio art as an undergraduate at New York University and earned her MFA in digital media from the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently works as the user-experience designer at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab at the Yale University Library in Connecticut. Ong was also a literary fellow with the organization Kundiman: which seeks to create a mentorship and community space for Asian Americans exploring their creative craft, artistic freedom, and the challenges within the Asian-American diaspora. When it comes to her influences, some of them include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Claudia Rankine and Barbara Kruger, Daisaku Ikeda, her family, and learning and connecting more with her own cultural history and heritage. Monica Ong is also a Bodhisattva, and Buddhism has influenced her work and her personhood, which you can learn more about from her interview on the podcast Buddhability, “Episode #30: How to overcome resistance in creative work.”
Her first book, Silent Anomalies, is a combination of her visual art and poetry that touches on many subjects of her life and family history. The poems speak on Chinese and Filipino history, politics, and identity from her perspective and understanding. She also speaks on social norms, cultural silence, and the “medical-emotional family diaspora” of her family which extends from China to the Philippines to the United States.
Ong’s mother dressed as a boy, image from Off the Shelf interview with Yvonne Wolfe.
Ong spoke in an interview on Off the Shelfwith Yvonne Wolfe about how ashamed her grandpa was at having 5 daughters, as in their culture, having sons was considered a true blessing. As a result, her grandfather dressed her mother as a boy for family portraits for several years, and Ong saw how that made her think about the cultural narratives of women’s bodies, the shame and negative values placed upon them.
She then spoke about her maternal aunt who struggled with mental illness, and how her dad, trained in Western medicine, attempted to help her but was at odds with Ong’s grandmother who was superstitious and said her daughter was possessed as a way of saving face in a world that did not understand, and still struggles with, mental illness. As such, Ong’s aunt remained undiagnosed and untreated for most of her life. Ong’s mother and aunt’s experiences were two crucial moments in her development of what she wanted to accomplish in Silent Anomalies. She wanted to think of art as a safe space to create and entertain dialogue about health issues, particularly where health and culture intersect.
Ong’s latest work, the exhibition Planetaria, is full of visual poetry inspired by astronomy, where text is integral to her artistic creation. The works in her exhibition has many different forms: shadow boxes, slideshow reels, and book carts are a few. Her pieces combine different representations of cosmological forms and celestial bodies, examples being tarot cards and Chinese astronomy.
Ong’s interest stemmed from wanting to know more about astronomy and Chinese cosmology. In an article for the New Haven Independent, she mentions how she was only semi-familiar with the Chinese system of constellations as a child. “Every fall we would have a moon festival and my family would get together, play games, and have a feast, and then there would be the story about a woman who drank a potion for everlasting life, and she went to the moon, but her lover stayed on Earth.”
The Star Gazer: Planisphere Poetry
When she became an adult and a parent, she wanted to pass her cultural heritage down to her son, so she began learning more about Chinese cosmology. She learned that some of the constellations in Greek cosmology appear in Chinese cosmology, as do some of the same star forms, but they are interpreted differently. For example, the stars that make Orion’s belt are three Gods of fortune in China. “There’s a lot less emphasis on mythical gods,” Ong said. “It’s a lot more a reflection of the hierarchy of society. So there are asterisms for accountants and archivists, as well as the king’s chariot drivers, and empty wells and fields. It’s a geography of the way the Emperor saw life (New Haven Independent).”
As Ong learned more about Chinese cosmology, she saw how it, like the Greek system, is “centered around male power.” She sought to change that in her work by using a feminist and personal narrative. She does this by using womanhood, the body, female scientists, and female cosmonauts. Her exhibition pieces also include her family’s ancestral history and immigration stories. Ong states that “What’s empowering about being an artist is that you can say, ‘how can we flip the script and write from a different point of view that centers the reader? How can we rethink our stories in a way that’s more inclusive for everyone?’ The palace is not up there; it’s actually your own life.”
This flipped script can especially be seen in the pieces here at Special Collections & Archives. The Star Gazer: Planisphere Poetry depicts the Chinese night sky from the northern hemisphere. It is based on the Soochow Astronomical Chart of 1193. This star chart holds small phrases of beautiful prose weaved around constellational lines to form the poetry within this piece. Taken directly from her Proxima Vera site, there are a few steps to read this structured poem:
“To view the stars, turn the disc to align the desired date with the hour of night. Face south and hold the planisphere overhead with the corner marked North facing north. The map will reveal a celestial poem that awaits you among the asterisms. Let the eyes wander and read aloud to someone dear.”
Close up of Lunar Volvelle
Her other work in our collection, Lunar Volvelle, also demonstrates how science, family, and poetry can weave together. Based on a device from the medieval era, Ong’s volvelle includes fragments of poetry along with an image of her paternal grandmother, whose image waxes and wanes with the phases of the moon. Ong explains her design on Proxima Vera stating, “During the full moon, my father’s mother will watch over you.”*
Overall, Ong’s work has been an exploration, a dive into family and research, connections and experiences, and solving the mysteries of what she wishes to learn more about.
Monica Ong is a visual poet, an artist, a mother, a sister, a daughter. She’s a driven Asian American woman who speaks her story, her family’s story, the story of women, particularly Asian American women, the story of immigrants and their families, cultural politics and traditions, and what it means to bean Asian American woman living in today’s society. You can check out her works at the Special Collections & Archives, and her book Silent Anomaliesfrom our Main Library! Happy Explorations, everyone.
*Correction on description of Lunar Volvelle made 1/13/2022. Original content said piece contained multiple images of family members. Imagery in piece does not include multiple faces as described before, but one, Ong’s paternal grandmother.
Sources
Aidasani, S. (2018, November 24). Monica Ong: Capturing poetry’s healing power – positively Filipino: Online magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora. Positively Filipino | Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora. Retrieved December 16, 2021, from http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/monica-ong-capturing-poetrys-healing-power
Bigelow, K. (2021, April 15). 2021 cover artist: Monica Ong. Dogwood. Retrieved December 16, 2021, from https://dogwoodliterary.com/2021/04/15/2021-cover-artist-monica-ong/
Institute Library Press Release (2021). The Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library presents: Monica Ong: Planetaria. Retrieved December 16, 2021, from https://institutelibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/planetaria-PR-final.pdf
Posted on July 2, 2021. (2021, November 9). Episode #30: How to overcome resistance in creative work. buddhability. Retrieved December 16, 2021, from https://buddhability.org/podcast/monicaong/%C2%A0%C2%A0
Slattery, B. (2021, June 15). Art exhibit traces a path to the stars. New Haven Independent. Retrieved December 16, 2021, from https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/planetaria/
Yau, J. (2021, August 6). A poet-artist looks to the stars. Hyperallergic. Retrieved December 16, 2021, from https://hyperallergic.com/667278/monica-ong-poet-artist-looks-to-the-stars/%C2%A0
The following is written by Asian Alumni and Student Oral History Project Intern Jin Chang
This a multi-part series reconstructing the history of the Asian American Coalition, a pan-ethnic Asian American student group from 1998-2017. This second blog post covers the Asian American Coalition’s early attempts to define their new student organization. It traces out their early attempts to identify their purpose, the activities they did as friends, and their engagement in socio-political activism from 1998-2002.
The Asian American Coalition had multiple purposes in its first four years of its existence. The group existed as a social, political, and educational organization throughout this time. While the students emphasized different aspects of the organization in different years, Asian American Coalition always had an eye towards the future.
As a social organization, the early iteration of the Asian American Coalition differed from the structure of a typical student organization at the University of Iowa: it had both graduate and undergraduate students involved, with an even ratio of graduate to undergraduate students. This meant their social events such as bowling nights, picnics, or general parties had both undergraduate and graduate students together. Some of the undergraduate students spoke fondly about having a built-in mentor from this arrangement. Meanwhile, the graduate students saw the inclusion of undergraduates as a way to ensure the future of the organization. In other words, the graduate students took the lead in running many aspects of the organization with the intention of handing off the Asian American Coalition to the undergraduates.
Here alumnus Kim Long discusses what it meant to have a graduate mentor in the Asian American Coalition:
This structure of mentorship enabled the Asian American Coalition to be a political organization. One of their first political goals was the creation of an Asian American Studies Program. The stated purpose of this academic program was to provide courses that reflected the history and culture of the Asian American community at the University of Iowa specifically. However, the graduate students that were involved with the Asian American Coalition saw even more potential with these courses as they viewed them as a way to politicize the undergraduate cohort of the organization to maintain their political agenda.
Beyond the classroom, the political nature of the Asian American Coalition can be seen immediately through its name. Their goal was to be an “umbrella organization” for Asian and Asian American students throughout the university. For these students, the idea of an “umbrella organization” meant they would be there to support other Asian students in their activities and times of need while providing a pan-Asian home for those that did not quite fit the mold of the other Asian organizations. One clear example this coalitional support was after an earthquake that devastated Taiwan in 1999, the Asian American Coalition offered their support to the Taiwanese Student Association to fundraise for their community. The original student leaders felt the name, Asian American Coalition, captured this notion of an “umbrella organization.”
While the Asian American Coalition primarily focused their efforts in building the future Asian community at Iowa, they also supported other multicultural organizations. For instance, the Asian American Coalition stood behind Black, Native, and Latino student groups on campus to maintain their unique cultural houses, now called Afro-House and the Latino Native American Cultural Center, rejecting a University plan to house all cultural centers in one residence hall. This multi-racial solidarity also meant that when the Asian American Coalition began advocating for the creation of an Asian American Cultural Center, the Black, Native, and Latino student groups on campus stood in solidarity with the Asian American Coalition.
Hear former student member Rosalind Sagara speak on the necessity of solidary between multicultural student groups on campus:
Chopstix Theatre Flyer
Finally, the Asian American Coalition served as an educational organization as they had a goal to spread cultural awareness throughout the larger community beyond the University. One of the first things many of the founding members of the Asian American Coalition spoke about was this feeling of constantly being watched in Iowa City because they were Asian. They saw the Asian American Coalition as an organization that could introduce the general public to the idea that Asian people lived in Iowa. They primarily did this through a sub-group of the Asian American Coalition called ChopStix Theatre.
Chopstix Theatre was a small group started by Asian American Coalition Members. They created puppet shows and reenacted children’s stories from various Asian countries as well as Asian American specific stories. They performed at the Iowa City Public Library, the Iowa Children’s Museum, Barnes & Noble, and at cultural festivals for kids. The goal was to introduce Asian culture and people to the children of the predominately white community in the Iowa City area with the hope that these fun stories would help kids grow into accepting adults.
Listen to alumnus Omega Dancel talk about the origins and purpose of Chopstix Theatre:
The Asian American Coalition was a social group, a political organization, and an educational theatre troupe. They were always future oriented, planning ahead to prolong the life of the organization and make an impact for Asian students living in Iowa. The graduate students that started it saw the potential for it to be a political organization, but they recognized social activities were important to build community. They sought Asian American Studies as a way to cultivate future political leaders for the Asian American Coalition. They created relationships with other Asian organizations and multicultural groups to respond to future events. They felt unwelcomed in the community and tried to find ways to change this by bringing Asian culture to children in the Iowa City Area. In short, the Asian American Coalition had the goal of creating a better Iowa for Asian Americans and the community at large.
