African American Writing, 1773-1910

Projects from the Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities

Each summer Cornell's Olin Library offers a fellowship program focused on preparing humanists with digital expertise enhancing their abilities to analyze information and engage new audiences in their research. As a result of this fellowship, the fellows generate digitally-based projects using techniques developed throughout the summer fellowship. This exhibition highlights a selection of the projects from the previous four summers.

The Art of Gazette du Bon Ton

This exhibit focuses on the role played by two major American clothing workers’ unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) in defending the standards of living and the job security of their members through the use of the union label and the promotion of the fashion industry in collaboration with prominent American designers. Sewn into every union-made garment, the label signaled to consumers that the goods they were buying were produced by American workers who enjoyed “fair labor standards and the American way of life.”

Films, Mills, and Poets: Mid-Century Bombay was an exhibit that was shown at the Carl A. Kroch Library's Asia Collections between September and November 2017, in conjunction with 'The Archive and the City of Bombay', a symposium held September 15. This online version highlights the major areas of the physical exhibit, while also showing a selection of the objects from the collection that were on display.

Go Figure explores perceptions and representations of Euro-American beauty ideals across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Through outerwear and undergarments, this historical costume exhibition shows how women’s bodies have been manipulated and shaped to fit fashionable silhouettes at different moments in time. From corsetry and girdles to diet and exercise, shaping the human body is critical to fashion change and illustrates the fluctuating and dynamic nature of socio-cultural conceptions of “beauty.”

An Old Industry Takes New Root

Cider - the alcoholic or "hard" variety - was long the favorite drink of the United States, but a variety of factors relegated it to the background for many years. Now, this age-old beverage has returned to the forefront with New York and Cornell University leading the charge.

An eclectic exhibition, indeed. It grew out of a simple and (intentionally) vague prompt: texture. What resulted was a group of students and staff members selecting some of the most visually stunning and beloved items hidden in the corners of our costume and textile collection. TEXTURE is about how fashion and textile objects can ask questions beyond their selvedges and seams.

Ithaca & Silent Film Style

The Biggest Little Fashion City explored Ithaca’s silent film history through the lens of costume, style, and fashion by chronicling the influence of the actors and actresses who lived and worked in Ithaca during the heyday of film production. Secondly, the exhibit highlighted the ways in which the new medium of moving pictures more broadly transformed fashion trends from the 1910s through the late 1920s.

Early Women in Botanical Illustration

Prior to the 20th century, one of the few paths to scientific relevance for women was the pursuit of botany; a number of women achieved success and recognition through illustrating scientific works on plant life with accuracy, skill, and beauty. This exhibit celebrates the art and achievements of several woman illustrators of the 19th and early 20th centuries whose works are held by Albert R. Mann Library.

WOMEN EMPOWERED: Fashions from the Frontline chronicles how women have strategically and persistently used fashion to empower and uplift. From activists to politicians, academics to servicewomen, artists to athletes, entertainers and everyday unsung heroes, WOMEN EMPOWERED uses fashion to tell the stories of women on the frontlines. The exhibit is therefore organized according to physical spaces--The Street, The Government, The Stage, The Sports Arena, The Academy--where fashion transforms, at times transgresses, and ultimately empowers.

Chocolate has been described as being more than a food, less than a drug. This description points to the singular position this wildly popular confection plays in our lives. Popular to the tune of $74 billion annually, chocolate begins as a tiny blossom on a small tropical tree. Only three out of a thousand of these will produce the cacao pods that after a labor intensive and lengthy journey, with several chemically and technically complex steps along the way, will end up in your hand as a candy bar.

Since they were first domesticated, nearly 10,000 years ago, in South and Southeast Asia, chickens have accompanied human beings everywhere on the planet. When the early European settlers arrived in the Americas, they unloaded crates of chickens - no doubt squawking in protest - from their crowded, stinking ships. For the next several hundred years, chickens chased bugs and scratched in the dust in farmyards and backyards all over the country.

This exhibit features books from the Phillips Beekeeping Collection, a testament to the hard work and vision of one man, the dedication of hundreds of beekeepers and the labor of millions of bees. In 1925, Everett Franklin Phillips, the recently hired professor of apiculture at Cornell, began to act on his desire to create a great central collection of beekeeping literature, an "accessible storehouse of our knowledge of bees and beekeeping."

FASHION AND FEATHERS explores the complex and nebulous space between inspiration and exploitation. Throughout the exhibition, we have endeavored to identify as many birds as possible, hypothesizing about abstracted representations of birds and identifying actual feathers. We invite you to “go birding” in this exhibition. Look closely at each item, identify birds, and in doing so, reflect upon the beauty and tragedy of fashion and feathers.

Black Excellence: Fashion that Prevails showcases the work of Black style tastemakers, influencers, and designers. The exhibition is organized thematically around the influences of African heritage, elegance, entertainment, and education. Curator Sian Brown MA ‘20 interviewed Black fashion designers in North America about their experiences in the industry, including their struggles, triumphs, and joys. Her research findings are conveyed through Black Excellence, which explores fashion design as a site where Black culture, dress, and identity are negotiated and produced.

The 10,000-item Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection holds many hidden treasures from several centuries of fashion. An exhibit, “Chinese Traditional Dress and Its Influence (1840-1960),” originally put some of its best Chinese pieces on display in the Elizabeth Schmeck Brown Gallery of the Human Ecology Building in 2013. Now the gallery will be open for viewing digitally, as well.

Earth Thinking 1970 to Tomorrow

Whole Earth Catalog presented a do-it-yourself approach to environmentalism against a backdrop of widespread pollution in the United States. At the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, that message of cooperation and education about environmental issues resonates stronger than ever.

Cornell's trees are at the core of the beauty of the university's campus, but of course they are also so much more. In honor of our woody flora, this exhibit pairs data on the ecological and economic value of specific campus trees with lovely illustrations from the Library’s rare and distinctive collections in the historical life sciences.

A Passion for Spiders

Spiders are diverse, fascinating and surprisingly useful to humans. This virtual version of a Mann Gallery exhibit created in collaboration with Dr. Linda S. Rayor (Entomology) challenges your preconceived notions, and encourages you to find some love for this much maligned species.

Understanding the Middle East through Geologic Movement

This exhibit features maps donated by Professor Muawia Barazangi, emeritus professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The maps and images explore how plate tectonics created, and shaped the geography of the Middle East, and how that geologic history resulted in the region’s status as both an oil & gas rich region, and an epicenter of natural disasters.

HIST 2391 - From Terra Incognita to Territories of Nation-States

History 2391 grew out of a desire to find a new way to expose students to the rich and diverse visual record of Early American history. The seminar engages the rich cartographic record of colonial North America via an in-depth analysis of two dozen iconic maps. Students assessed human representations of space across cultural boundaries, and explored change over time in the mapmaking practices of indigenous peoples and various European intruders.

visual narratives in Japanese pop culture

A curated tour through the President Andrew Dickson White Library, the historic heart of Cornell's first library, and iconic university landmark. This online exhibition explores the architecture, history, and people associated with the A. D. White Library.

Gender, Race, and Expertise

In her 1981 essay, “The Legacies of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood,” Angela Y. Davis explained that the 19th century cults of true womanhood and domesticity expressed an ideal of femininity that did not extend to Black women and enshrined whiteness at the beginning of movements for women’s independence. This exhibit asks how gender, race, and expertise intersect in the new profession of home economics by focusing on how this discipline re-fashioned women’s bodies around the year 1916.

Artwork Done By Cornell Student Organizations

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, major disruptions and shutdowns to activities on and off campus forced student organizations to continue virtually for the remainder of the spring semester. For many organizations, this meant that the work they had done over the semester could not be shared/performed. The virtual art show, Work Left Unsaid, creates a platform that gives a voice to the work that was sadly unable to be experienced/seen.

Wrap, Protect, Cover, Perform

GREEN ARMOR is a fashion exhibition that explores and celebrates the power of the color green as a form of armor throughout fashion history. Green has a longstanding relationship with the human body: it signals illness but also alerts the body when it is safe to “go,” enhanced today by our collective Cornell COVID-19 dashboard that reminds us green is the “new normal.” We represent different facets of green armor through the following themes: The Troupers, The Emissaries, The Dancers, The Viewers and The Playwrights (In Three Acts).

In this exhibition we use trash as a lens to rethink the social constructions of waste, marginalization, and consumption and how we might reclaim these stories through repair, preservation, and re-narrativization. Trash is not just something produced by individuals that is automatically gross, offensive, disgusting or harmful. It’s all part of a wider sociocultural, political, ecological, and economic system.

This fashion exhibition critically examines the collecting practices of Professor Beulah Blackmore and Mrs. Ruth Sharp who contributed to the development of two ethnological dress collections on Cornell’s campus: the "Ethnic Collection" within the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and the "Hmong Clothing and Textile Collection" within the Department of Anthropology Collections.

The Journey Begins

This exhibition is a journey to discover and explore science fiction and its fashion. Through a comprehensive look at the genre of science fiction we have curated an exhibition that dives into the many realms of this tiered genre. With a little perseverance, patience, and creativity, three student curators came together to deliver a fashion exhibition like no other. Prepare to discover multiple aspects of fashion's relationship with science fiction, from your favorite superheroes to popular culture references.

The Legacies of American Swimwear

This digital fashion exhibition considers the nuanced social, cultural, and economic implications of swimsuits throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Bathing costumes from the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection are put in conversation with historical advertisements, photos, and articles that provide context. The exhibit challenges us to think about how the body, garment production, leisure, gender norms, and intersectionality are both concealed and revealed through swimwear.

Fashion in Transit explores the relationship between what we wear and how we move. Organized according to forms of fashioned moment - swimming, sliding, walking, riding, rolling, flying, and orbiting - this exhibit illustrates the ways that garments and accessories have long been influenced by various modes of transportation, and in some cases, have been the very element that enabled those activities to take place.