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Orchestrating Community: The Public Service of Iowa Conductor James Dixon, the spring 2026 exhibition in the Main Library Gallery, provides a glimpse into the life of its namesake through stories and objects from the recently donated James Dixon Papers. From newspaper clippings and photographs to official documents and correspondence, each item on display helps piece together his adventurous international career as an orchestra conductor while celebrating his roles as a longtime director of both the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra and the Quad City Symphony Orchestra. 

Sarah Suhadolnik, assistant professor of instruction at the University of Iowa School of Music, co-curated the exhibition with Katie Buehner, director of the Rita Benton Music Library. The broader Dixon collection, now part of the University Archives at the UI Libraries, provided a strong foundation for Suhadolnik’s exhibition research.  

Question: What inspired you to co-curate this exhibition?  
Answer: I always listen with great interest to Katie’s tales of how the library collects the rare items it accumulates. Discussions of the work involved in acquiring the Dixon  materials pushed me to develop my graduate seminar “Histories of U.S. Orchestras.” When it came time to put the exhibit together, Katie thought my work on the course would prove useful in developing the narrative for the exhibit. It did.  
 
Q: What drew you into the story of James Dixon (1928–2007)? 
A: Accessibility of, and advocacy for, public arts experiences are essential talking points in orchestral music right now. The Maestro gives us a lot to reflect on when thinking about both.  

Dixon hints in some of his public remarks at frustration with the notion that an artist interested in a sustainable performance career must invest a certain amount of energy in what we today call their “personal brand.” Even though he had a New York Philharmonic conductor on proverbial speed dial, Dixon’s aversion to “selling himself,” cultivating the type of public following we now measure with social media accounts and the like, limited both the number and prestige of performance positions available to him. At the same time, orchestras were not an abstract public good to him. He operated at all times with a tangible vision of what his ensembles contributed to their respective communities and could speak very clearly and effectively about that.  

Q: What has curating this exhibit meant to you as both a scholar and musician? 
A: At its most personal to me, the exhibit is an ode to what I fear can get lost in conservatory-style music education. Long hours alone in a practice room can make it hard to feel enmeshed in a larger musical ecosystem. The rigors of this type of musical training can undermine a performer’s relationship with prospective listeners, and/or make attending a live performance as part of an audience into a chore.  
 
Q: How did you approach your research in the archives?  
A: Throughout, I have organized my research for the exhibit around two core objectives: firstly, to introduce the broader public to the breadth of what is available in Dixon’s collected papers; and secondly, to trace the depth of Dixon’s roots in the local community. This often meant working in multiple directions simultaneously.  

To be able to accomplish the first objective, I had to understand what was in the collection, and the only way to do that was to explore what I could while it was being processed. Work towards the second objective looked a lot like storyboarding. As I got to know the collection a bit better, I collected what fragments I could of the stories waiting to be told with the materials. I built up a holistic view of Dixion’s life and work as it relates to the lesser-known history of regional orchestras.  

Q: Why is it important to have this exhibit in the Main Library Gallery? 
A: If the exhibit were not in the gallery, I wouldn’t have had the chance to collaborate with the amazing team that works there. I have learned more from Sara, Lauren, and the rest about public-facing scholarly work than I have from any number of papers, conference presentations, and seminars on the topic.  
 
Q: What are some of the most surprising things you learned during your research for this project?  
A: I learned a lot about what a tragedy it is to lose local news. Papers in small communities like Guthrie Center had so many subtle yet significant ways of maintaining strong bonds among close-knit residents. For instance, a lot of the local newspaper announcements I found for concerts on the University of Iowa campus included the names of students who had grown up in the place of publication.     
 
Q: What is your favorite object in the exhibit?  
A: “The Conductor’s Study,” which is more of a built environment than a singular object. It’s this element that allowed me to fully experience what the medium of exhibitions can accomplish that scholarly publication cannot.  

Q: What do you hope visitors will take away from their time in Orchestrating Community? 
A: I expect the pictures of Dixon’s return to Guthrie Center with the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra to personally resonate with a lot of visitors. If they weren’t a member of an ensemble performing in a gymnasium like the one pictured, or a guest at the type of school reception pictured, they likely know someone who was. I hope visitors take a moment as they enjoy all the exhibit has to offer to think about all the people and places they are connected to because of such community music experiences.  
 

Orchestrating Community: The Public Service of Iowa Conductor James Dixon will be on display through June 26, 2026. The Main Library Gallery is open daily. Plus, hear clips from Dixon’s conducting career online. 

This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery. 

There are a number of hallmarks that we look for when identifying children’s media: big pictures, bold and eye-catching colors, large fonts. Children’s books especially are known for these traits, and have been since the 19th century, when they first became their own market and genre. Much like kid’s television shows today, stories often included a moral, or lesson, that extolled virtues like selflessness, patience, and kindness. 

Orbis Pictus by Johannes Amos Comenius was published in 1658. As one of the first instructional picture books for children, Comenius’s approach leaned heavily on visual learning and the use of instructional pictures and drawings. The goal was to teach learning comprehension through association: pairing words with images by placing them next to each other, until reading the given word independently recalled the corresponding image. Scholar Andrea Korda, in their journal article “Thinking with Pictures: Memory, Imagination, and Colour Illustration in Victorian Teaching and Learning,” writes that pictures were essential to Comenius’s methods not only because of their familiarity as iconic representations, but also because, according to Comenius, “children (even from their infancy almost) are delighted with pictures.” 

An important and equally iconic aspect of early children’s books was the chromolithograph. The process of the chromolithograph involved drawing a picture using an oil or grease-based ink and transferring that image to stone or metal plates and then printing over that image multiple times using differently colored versions of the same image. When put together fully, the colors of the different layers would produce a fully colored and detailed image that evoked the feeling of an oil painting, but at a fraction of the cost. Depending on how much detail a chromolithographer wanted in their picture, they might use anywhere from as little as eight plates to as many as forty to complete an image. Though used many times in children’s books, the chromolithograph was also used in collectible trading cards, Christmas cards, and calendars.   

Children’s books such as A Party of Six: A Movable Toybook by notable 19^th-century author and bookmaker Lothar Meggendorfer also boasted interactive elements. These took the shape of flaps, pull tabs, and pop-up pictures that gave the book a feeling as though it were alive, as though it were a small puppet theatre instead of a book. These types of books enchanted children. Due to the significant amount of effort and detail they took to produce, these books typically were affordable only to richer and more affluent families.  

As both time and the children’s book industry progressed, chromolithography fell out of style, making way for modern machine color printing, which made color printing both cheaper and easier. Because of this, brightly colored children’s books, trading cards, calendars, and the like became much cheaper and accessible to people outside of the upper classes.  

A Party of Six is on display in the Main Library Gallery’s Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education exhibition, which showcases the fascinating world of paper technologies. Curated by Giselle Simón, Damien Ihrig, and Elizabeth Yale, this interactive exhibition invites visitors to explore paper dolls, flap books, pop-ups, tunnel books, volvelles, and books that use paper to make sounds while learning about their historical and contemporary significance. It is open to the public through Dec. 19, 2025. 

Further reading:

Korda, Andrea. 2020. “Thinking with Pictures: Memory, Imagination, and Colour Illustration in Victorian Teaching and Learning.” Paedagogica Historica 56 (3): 269–92. doi:10.1080/00309230.2018.1550520. 

Visit the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives to view editions of Orbis Pictus and other historic children’s books.

This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery. 

Cards are found in many games, across time and place. They can be adapted to appeal to different ages, different playing styles, and even different commercial franchises. The history of card games is very much one of evolution and innovation. Though the 52-card deck has existed since the 15th century, thought to originate in France, the oldest playing cards are thought to date back to the Tang Dynasty during the first millennium. Though the cards that we’re familiar with today are made of plastic-coated cardstock, Tang Dynasty playing cards were made of paper, printed with woodcuts, and doubled as a form of currency.

In his History of Playing Cards, Rodney P. Carlisle talks about the rise in popularity of playing cards across Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries:  

“Writings from this period document card games being played in Spain by 1371, and in France and Switzerland by 1377. The early decks were handmade works of art available only to the rich, but the introduction of the mass production of paper around 1400, coupled with the popularity of woodcut printing, quickly led to the creation of inexpensive decks for the general public.” 

Cards have a wide range of uses. Historically, they’ve been used as collection items, to tell fortunes, for currency, and of course, for gambling, having been associated with gambling for as long as they’ve been around. Card players from the Tang Dynasty would have used the cards themselves as betting money, raising the stakes by literally gambling away the hands they played with. As card playing spread across Europe, some governments found themselves more troubled by this new pastime than they’d expected. Carlisle wrote that “[in 1397] the prévôt of Paris declared a workday ban on recreations that could distract workers; in addition to cards, dice, tennis, and all forms of bowling were named in the decree.” 

Possibly the only use for cards as famous as gambling is fortune telling. Tarot cards are a popular form of fortune telling, along with oracle decks, though fortune tellers have also been known to use regular card decks to tell fortunes. Le Livre du Destin, or The Book of Fate, is a French 32-card oracle deck from 1900. It features a wide variety of different archetypes of people, in typical fortune telling fashion, all meant to relate to some potential aspect of a person’s life.  

Before we can understand how to use The Book of Fate, we must first understand how tarot and oracle decks work. Tarot is more universally known and also follows a more rigid system of rules than oracle decks. Tarot decks are made up of 78 cards, the most well-known of which are the Major Arcana. Major Arcana take the form of archetypes, such as “The Empress,” “The Fool,” “The Hermit,” or “The Hanged Man.” These cards represent broad life lessons and challenges that we may face, like going through a loss, a change in direction, or new beginnings. Sound vague? They’re meant to be! The answers that tarot gives are broad and are accepted to not take shape for days to weeks or even months after a reading. 

So, what’s the difference between tarot and oracle reading? Oracle decks are much more freeform, with no standard number of cards and no consistent imagery from deck to deck. Typically, oracle cards rely on our immediate intuition for interpretation, and are better suited to answer more specific, “yes/no” type questions. While a tarot reading invites the reader to meditate on what the answers could mean, oracle cards require a good deal less overthinking. So, since The Book of Fate is an oracle deck, we should ask questions that are less vague and more to-the-point than what we’d ask if we were reading tarot. Additionally, the types of cards in the deck will let us know what types of answers we’ll get. The cards in The Book of Fate are based mostly on common social roles, characters, or themes seen among English or French society in the late Victorian era, such as “a soldier,” “a man of law,” “a fair-haired girl,” or “a business letter.”  

Of course, while their use might be more straightforward than tarot, oracle readings do still take a little interpretive work from the user. After all, the point of fortune telling decks is that they can be applied to and interpreted by just about anyone, regardless of circumstance or background!  

The Book of Fate is on display in the Main Library Gallery’s Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education exhibition, which showcases the fascinating world of paper technologies. Curated by Giselle Simón, Damien Ihrig, and Elizabeth Yale, this interactive exhibition invites visitors to explore paper dolls, flap books, pop-ups, tunnel books, volvelles, and books that use paper to make sounds while learning about their historical and contemporary significance. It is open to the public through Dec. 19, 2025. 

Further reading:

“History of Playing Cards.” In Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, edited by Carlisle, Rodney P., 289-93. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412971935.n170.

This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery.

Everyone can relate to the experience of playing with toys as a little kid. Whether Barbie dolls or action figures, dump trucks or Hot Wheels, the toys we played with were vehicles for our imagination and the stories we wanted to tell. Of course, this is far from a new phenomenon. Dolls specifically have been around for thousands of years, with the oldest examples being made of stone and clay and more recent examples being made of plastic or porcelain. One of the first commercially available paper dolls was made in 1810 by S & J Fuller. Her name was Little Fanny, and she quickly sparked a whole genre of children’s toys of a similar style.

For those who couldn’t afford the luxury cost of a porcelain doll or for those who simply couldn’t sew, paper dolls offered an easily accessible alternative, with both everyday people as well as large corporations making their own versions. The paper clothing pictured below was handmade by Lois Crasper Thor from Clinton, Iowa circa the mid-20th century. While commercial versions of paper dolls certainly existed during the time these were made, dolls like these were perhaps the most common sort. Anyone could make their own dolls with whatever clothes they liked, and often a profession and life story to match. Paper dolls were, and continue to be, an outlet for childhood storytelling and imagination. Part of what they represented was possibility—the idea that you really could be anything.

Of course, the existence of handmade paper dolls didn’t mean that the commercial doll industry was suffering. In Old Paper Dolls: Popular Adult Collectibles, Anne Gilbert writes about the rise of the paper doll: “By 1859 Godey’s Lady’s Book began publishing a complete series of paper dolls; six boys and six girls, with a set of their own newest fashions.” Like all dolls, paper dolls were equally influential in terms of both gender roles and clothing trends, the two were often intertwined. By the early 20th century, popular fashion and homemaking newspapers and magazines such as McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Home Companion were publishing their own paper doll families. Dolls have a history of reflecting pop culture at the time—current fashion trends, as well as popular occupations or hobbies. Movie stars, horse jockeys, tennis players, artists, and more can all be found represented in different paper dolls.

Just as we might find different toy franchises featuring modern celebrities with their own toys or dolls today, celebrities and public figures have also historically been represented by paper dolls. Though women were made into dolls more often than men, certain exceptions, like this 1981 copy of The First Family Paper Doll & Cut-Out Book featuring Ronald and Nancy Reagan, serve as small reminders that the demographic wasn’t completely singular. Though there were certainly more paper dolls fashioned around women and girls, dolls fashioned around boys and men existed and were in some cases highly prized by their owners, much like the Ken dolls of today.

The materials in this article are on display in the Main Library Gallery’s  Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education exhibition, which showcases the fascinating world of paper technologies. Curated by Giselle Simón, Damien Ihrig, and Elizabeth Yale, this interactive exhibition invites visitors to explore paper dolls, flap books, pop-ups, tunnel books, volvelles, and books that use paper to make sounds while learning about their historical and contemporary significance. It is open to the public through Dec. 19, 2025.

This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery.

The Symbolist Movement took place in France and Belgium in the late 19th century as a response to styles that emphasized realistic and classical forms. Visitors to the Main Library Gallery’s spring 2025 exhibit, A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive will note the wide variety of abstract and non-traditional art throughout the gallery. This is because the Symbolists believed that deeper meanings could be discovered through art that did not attempt to make sense of the subject through literal portrayal. Symbolism is still used by many artists today.

Though the exhibit focuses on works inspired by French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” we can see the influence of notable American poet Edgar Allan Poe in several pieces within the exhibit. The goal of Symbolist art is to use abstract visuals to represent specific concepts—anything from the mourning, uncertainty, or twisting anxiety we see in Poe’s poems to the breaking of barriers and boundaries in Mallarme’s “Un coup de dés.”

Poe’s use of concepts like dreams, abstraction, and psychoanalysis made him very popular among the Symbolist crowd, especially with his focus on darker concepts. Charles Baudelaire was the first person to translate Poe to French, and Stéphane Mallarmé was the first to translate The Raven, specifically. Poe became an influential figure among the Symbolists for the way that he used imagery in his writing to communicate so clearly the themes of his stories. The Raven stands as an excellent example of this. Many of Poe’s stories center on a protagonist who carries on toward some sort of breaking point—a moment at which we realize that something about the story, whether it be the protagonist or the world around them, is no longer what it seems. In The Raven, for example, what drives our protagonist toward his mounting mental breakdown is the presence of the titular raven, who repeats the word “nevermore” over and over. The protagonist interprets meaning into this message—grief and dread, and inescapable loss, though these themes are never communicated directly to us.   

To quote scholar James Lawler on Poe’s Symbolist influence, “For Baudelaire he was ‘one of the greatest of literary heroes,’ for Mallarmé ‘the spiritual Prince of this age,’ for Valéry an ‘achieved mind’: Symbolists that stand at the beginning, middle, and end of a lineage are constant in their fidelity to Poe. They encountered half-secretly, each in turn, a stranger to the canon and found in him the key to their works, for he served Baudelaire against Hugo, Mallarmé against Baudelaire, Valéry against Mallarmé. Distinct from the native conventions, he provoked less violence or anxiety than the intimate ferment of self-recognition.” 

A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive is open through June 27, 2025. Learn more about the exhibit and the Main Library Gallery’s open hours at lib.uiowa.edu/gallery. The Main Library Gallery is free and open to the public.