Spring/Summer 2021 No. 16

Spring/Summer 2021 Issue 16

Independence Days An exhibition and series of public programs at the Newberry explore the Age of Revolutions in Latin America

“Where did you find that great mask?”

“Are you vaccinated?”

“Can we bump elbows?”

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he questions we ask each other as greetings are entirely new because of the pandemic. Recently, I was heartened to hear these questions about masks, shots, and elbow bumping from Chicago-based consul generals from Ibero-American countries as they joined Curator of Americana Will Hansen to tour the Newberry’s current exhibition, ¡Viva la Libertad! Latin America and the Age of Revolutions. Walking through the library galleries with visitors from Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, and other countries while discussing books, manuscripts, and stunning maps that document the freedom struggles in multiple Latin American countries was so inspiring.

Despite the many obstacles that we’ve encountered over the past fifteen months, Newberry staff has continued to engage students, scholars, researchers, and lifelong learners in many vital ways. Paging through the features in this issue of The Newberry Magazine, I’m struck by how our staff has navigated one of the most challenging periods of our professional careers.

In this issue, you’ll learn about three participants in our Adult Education Seminars Program who had breakthroughs in their genealogy research. An overview of the ¡Viva la Libertad! exhibition attests to the diversity of our Americana collections and the ways we are seeking to engage broader audiences, including Spanish speakers. Our vast collection is always growing, evidenced here by the recent acquisition of papers from Eve L. Ewing, one of the most dynamic and versatile writers today and a longtime participant in Newberry programs. And you’ll learn about our collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago to feature new work by artist Jeffrey Gibson (a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) who engages with Newberry holdings to upend myths about Indigenous people in the past and the present.

Enabling research discoveries. Offering classes and seminars. Mounting engaging exhibitions. Growing the collection. Examining the relevance of the past for the present.

These activities are the lifeblood of the Newberry, as they have been for decades. We always take pride in the work that we do. Yet I’m particularly proud of how we’ve advanced the Newberry’s mission in the face of this pandemic.

So, enroll in a Newberry class. Visit our exhibition galleries. Engage with our collections on site or online. Join a public program. I think you’ll be impressed, just as I am, with how the Newberry staff has conducted “business as usual” during such an unusual time.

Sincerely,

Daniel Greene, President and Librarian

MAGAZINE STAFF EDITOR Alex Teller DESIGNER Andrea Villasenor PHOTOGRAPHY Catherine Gass The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually. Every other issue includes the annual report for the most recently concluded fiscal year.

A subscription to The Newberry Magazine is a benefit of membership in the Newberry Associates.

To become a member, contact Vince Firpo at (312) 255-3599 or firpov@newberry.org.

Unless otherwise credited, all images are from the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry and have been provided by the Newberry’s Digital Imaging Services Office.

@newberrylibrary

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Contents FEATURES Archival Inclination Liesl Olson

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Writer and sociologist Eve L. Ewing recently gave her personal archive to the Newberry. Ewing’s impulse to collect is rooted in a tradition among Black artists of building archives not just to preserve the past but to challenge ideas about what is worth saving.

Independence Days Matthew Clarke

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An exhibition and series of public programs at the Newberry explore the Age of Revolutions 200 years ago, when the United States as well as countries across Latin America—from Mexico to Chile—emerged from colonial rule.

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Family Lore Matthew Clarke

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A lawsuit involving Adlai Stevenson. A mysterious Civil War medal. An escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad. Three genealogists are telling their families’ stories after gaining new research and writing skills in a virtual adult education seminar.

Let the Chaos Happen Analú López 11

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New work by the artist Jeffrey Gibson (a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) is featured in Sweet Bitter Love, an exhibition at the Newberry. In a recent conversation, Gibson shared his process for making art that engages with history.

DEPARTMENTS TAKE NOTE 2 16

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NOW ON NEWBERRY.ORG

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IN MEMORIAM 27 RETROSPECT: Recent Events

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PROSPECT: Upcoming Events

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TA K E N O T E Laura McEnaney Named Vice President for Research and Academic Programs We’re thrilled to welcome Laura McEnaney as the Newberry’s next Vice President for Research and Academic Programs.

In this role, McEnaney will direct Newberry fellowships and research centers, public programs and adult education seminars, and teacher and student programs.

McEnaney, currently professor of history at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and Vice President of the Teaching Division of the American Historical Association, will join the Newberry staff in August.

“As an accomplished scholar of history and a passionate advocate for teaching and mentorship, Laura McEnaney will guide the Newberry’s scholarly programming while advancing public engagement initiatives inside and outside the walls of the library,” said Daniel Greene, President and Librarian of the Newberry. “In joining the Newberry staff, Laura is returning to her hometown and the city that has been the focus of her impressive scholarly work. It is a pleasure to welcome Laura back to Chicago. We’re eager to learn from her vast experience.”

Laura McEnaney

Inspired by Newberry Symposium, New Book Examines Violence and Indigenous Communities In the spring of 2017, the Newberry’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies hosted a scholarly symposium examining violence in Native communities, past and present. “Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present” explored gendered assault and enslavement in Native communities, the destruction of Indigenous homelands and environments, and the appropriation of Native arts and cultural heritage. This February, scholars Jeff Ostler, Joshua Reid, and Susan Sleeper-Smith (a former McNickle Center director) published a book with Northwestern University Press based on the symposium. With contributions from multiple scholars, Violence and Indigenous Communities focuses on topics including activism, identity, historical memory, resilience, and healing, while addressing the long history of genocidal violence against Indigenous people and emphasizing the agency of Indigenous individuals and communities.

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Archive of Mister Kelly’s Nightclub Is the Latest Addition to the Newberry Collection The Newberry has acquired the archives of Mister Kelly’s, an iconic twentieth-century Chicago nightclub, cultural hub, and launchpad for comedians and singers including Richard Pryor, Barbra Streisand, and many others.

Consisting of both digital and physical materials, the collection includes more than one hundred oral histories with singers, musicians, and comedians, as well as books, periodicals, posters, live recordings, photographs, and artifacts like menus, matchbooks, ashtrays, and dinner plates. One highlight among the ephemera is a bar tab run up by comedian Lenny Bruce.

“We’re delighted to bring the Mister Kelly’s archive to the Newberry, where it will complement and extend our existing holdings in Chicago history, performing arts, and social action,” said Alison Hinderliter, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Archives at the Newberry. “Researchers, artists, and members of the public will have direct access to a range of fascinating ephemera, oral histories, photographs, and artifacts documenting the history of this storied venue.”

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N O W O N N E W B E R R Y. O R G

The Codex Zempoala: Asserting Indigenous Rights In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of Mexico asserted their rights to land in the face of Spanish colonization. At the time, the Spanish were imposing their own system of haciendas, ranches, and other mechanisms to regulate land tenure.

In response, a group of Nahua people from a village called Zempoala created a book proving their long-standing connection to the land.

The Codex Zempoala on display in the Newberry’s current exhibition ¡Viva la Libertad! Latin America and the Age of Revolutions. Photo by Anne Ryan

A Letter from Napoleon Foreshadows Revolution On May 6, 1808, Napoleon wrote a letter to his stepson after ruthlessly putting down an uprising in Madrid: “More than 2,000 of the troublemakers have been killed. I have 60,000 men who have nothing to do. We took advantage of this affair to disarm the city.”

Napoleon might have known his actions would lead to a fierce struggle against him in Spain. But he could not have predicted that he would help pave the way for freedom struggles to blossom thousands of miles away in Latin America.

A letter from Napoleon regarding an uprising in Madrid foreshadowed liberation struggles in Latin America.

Learn about these items on the Newberry’s Source Material blog. They are also currently on display in ¡Viva la Libertad!

Latin America and the Age of Revolutions, open at the Newberry through July 24.

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Archival Inclination

By Liesl Olson

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few years ago, in the fall of 2018, Chicago writer and sociologist Eve L. Ewing made a visit to the Newberry Library. Ewing was poised to publish her third book, a collection of remarkable poems called 1919, an imaginative response to historical accounts of the race riots that swept through Chicago in 1919. She also had agreed to serve as an advisor on the Newberry’s year-long, collaborative series of programs exploring the history and legacy of the riots, including a program in which she would perform her new poems.

An admirer of Ewing’s writing and activism, I was excited to show her the Newberry. I had no idea that her visit would lead to an extraordinary new acquisition for the library: Ewing’s own papers.

I met Ewing in the Special Collections Reading Room, where I had pulled collection materials that I thought might interest her. Born and raised in Chicago, where she attended Chicago Public Schools and then the University of Chicago (where she is now an assistant professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice), Ewing is a daring, high-volume writer across genres. She published her first non-fiction book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side in 2018 while simultaneously writing a new superhero series for Marvel Comics. She is the coauthor with poet Nate Marshall of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (2017), which is performed by puppeteers, musicians, and actors working in shadow.

Ewing and literary scholar Kenneth Warren during a discussion at the Newberry, September 2019.

Ewing and Liesl Olson in the Newberry’s Special Collections Reading Room, December 2018.

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“ The report was like an old tapestry with loose threads sticking out. And I wanted to tug on them and see what I could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.”

For several summers, Ewing helped organize the “Chicago poetry block party,” an outdoor communitybuilding festival staged at places like the historic Wabash YMCA in Bronzeville and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen. (I can attest that these were parties, the opposite of quiet and staid poetry readings.) Ewing has won more awards and accolades than seems possible for someone in her mid-thirties. From her 2018 appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah to a 2020 interview with Terry Gross, a Twitter account with nearly 250,000 followers, and two prestigious 2021 fellowships, Ewing is a captivating thinker with a wide reach. Her brilliance and charisma had me a little starstruck.

Spread out on the table were photographs, letters, and literary magazines from Chicago. We looked at a 1961 letter from poet Gwendolyn Brooks to writer and editor Jack Conroy, which includes Brooks’s now-infamous recipe for a frozen fruit salad. There were a few photographs of the old Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom and a large book of bright lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett illustrating a 1937 poem by Margaret Walker.

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A little less spectacular, yet rife with Chicago history, was a fat typescript from the papers of Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News from 1876 until 1925. Lawson was one of twelve civic leaders appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations after the 1919 rioting. The commission included six white men and six Black men. (Women, as Ewing joked, had not yet been invented.) The typescript contained minutes from a November 1919 meeting, following the riots, in which the twelve men discussed how they would document what had happened—and their hope of ensuring that it would not happen again.

This commission eventually published The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations in 1922. A report of more than six hundred pages, it is one of the most important primary sources on race relations during the twentieth century. “Many of its passages immediately made me think about poetry,” Ewing writes in the opening pages of 1919. “They were so narrative, so evocative, so imagistic.”

Largely written by the African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson, the commission report renders the everyday lives of Black Chicagoans in limpid prose and contains invaluable photographs, charts, and maps. The commission’s findings of systemic racism were voluminous, but very few of its recommendations were enacted. “The report was like an old tapestry with loose threads sticking out,” Ewing wrote, “and I wanted to tug on them and see what I could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.”

The Victor Lawson Papers include meeting minutes and other documents produced by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a group convened by the city in response to racial violence in the summer of 1919. In 1919, Ewing incorporates text from the commission’s report into her poems.

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Weaving together Chicago’s past using language that still resonates deeply today—this is Ewing’s signature style, a way of rendering history that also transforms our thinking about possibilities for the future. At the start of many of her poems in 1919, Ewing quotes from the commission report, provoking readers to think about where we have been, and where we might go.

Ewing has called herself an Afrofuturist: she creates new stories that see ahead—sometimes fantastical, threaded with elements of science fiction—in resistance to the erasure of Black people from American history. In the book’s last poem, she considers the legacy of racial violence and restores the life of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicagoan who was lynched in 1955 on a trip to Mississippi. “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” is the title of the poem, which begins: Looking over the plums, one by one Lifting each to his eyes and Turning it slowly, a little earth, Checking the smooth skin for pockmarks And rot, or signs of unkind days or people An everyday errand pays homage to Till’s gentle life in contrast to his violent death at the hands of a white mob. But the poem turns over the question, Is the earth rotten? Ewing’s poem also conjures other key poems in American literary history: Brooks’s two poems about Till in her 1960 volume The Bean Eaters and Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 “A Supermarket in California,” which imagines Walt Whitman, a “graybeard, lonely old courage teacher,” ambling through f luorescent-lit grocery aisles. Both Ewing and Ginsberg wonder about the fate of the United States. Ewing’s poem ends with a question to Till: how are things going for you oh he sighed and put the candy on the belt it goes, it goes.

If time is like the turn of a conveyer belt, then will Till’s terrible story of racial violence keep looping back around again?

During her visit, Ewing and I talked about how the materials I showed her in the reading room became part of the Newberry’s collection. What survives? What gets lost? Take Victor Lawson’s meticulous record of the 1919 commission.

Are there other accounts of the commission’s conversations that might be recovered? Of less “official” histories?

Naturally, I asked Ewing if she kept an archive of her own. Yes, she said, she certainly did. Ewing has been amassing her own formidable archive since she started writing, including drafts of essays and books, art projects, photographs, cards, text threads, and marked-up manuscripts. She has kept materials related to her work with community organizations and children, and her letters and email correspondence with writers, scholars, and organizers in Chicago and beyond.

We continued talking about where this material might end up, where it might be preserved for the future. Would she consider the Newberry?

It may seem surprising—the archival inclination of such a young writer—but Ewing’s impulse to collect has an important history. A commitment to archiving, as the Columbia University scholar Brent Hayes Edwards has argued, is an indispensable element of the Black radical tradition. For many Black writers and intellectuals, the aim of saving materials is not only to preserve the past, but also to challenge ideas about what is worth saving. Historically, most archival repositories like the Newberry did not prioritize collecting or preserving African American history.

Significant collections kept by Black artists and intellectuals sometimes remained in the attics, basements, or closets of their own homes. Preserving these collections oneself could become a form of resistance to the primacy of white-only narratives, as if to say, I’m saving what I know you won’t save. For example, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, who died in 2014, kept hundreds of boxes in his basement in Newark, New Jersey, documenting his life as a writer, activist, and institution-builder. His work as a collector correlates with his work on the streets. Similarly, the origins of the DuSable Museum of African American History began in the Bronzeville residence of its founder, educator and artist Margaret Burroughs, who created an archive of Black history that she kept in her home.

A commitment to archiving . . . is an indispensable element of the Black radical tradition. For many Black writers and intellectuals, the aim of saving materials is not only to preserve the past, but also to challenge ideas about what is worth saving.

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“ Writers and archivists did me a kindness by making sure these materials stuck around for the future. It’s my responsibility to do the same.”

Some materials, of course, also come from the homes of less well-known people who save all kinds of material, from scrapbooks and newspapers to yearbooks and home movies. A recent exhibit marking the fifteenth anniversary of Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium’s founding points out how many Black historical collections have been “hidden” because they remained in private hands. The aims of the BMRC (of which the Newberry is a member) include expanding access to these collections and supporting Black communities as they save and preserve personal, institutional, and community archives.

When Ewing was nineteen, she took a course with Jacqueline Goldsby, a literary scholar then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University, who oversaw an extraordinary project called Mapping the Stacks. The project, which began in 2003, aimed to identify and organize uncatalogued archival collections that chronicle Black Chicago between the 1930s and 1970s. This work has led to countless new books, projects, and programs related to the history and cultural ferment of Black Chicago. (My own writing would not be the same without the project.)

In Goldsby’s class, Ewing worked with archival materials from two African American newspapers: the Chicago Defender and the Chicago Bee. One year later, she looked at materials from the papers of Gwendolyn Brooks. One of the many gems in Brooks’s collection are her annotated copies of TV Guide magazine. Ewing could see the pages that Brooks tore out. (A revelation? Brooks loved soap operas.) These archives conserve a vital humanity. “Writers and archivists did me a kindness by making sure these materials stuck around for the future,” Ewing told me, “and it’s my responsibility to do the same.”

Ewing decided to donate her papers to the Newberry after further conversations that included Alison Hinderliter, the Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts. A few months after our initial meeting, Hinderliter and I met Ewing in the library’s parking lot. This time, Ewing had packed her car full of plastic bins. We carted the bins up to a room on the library’s fourth f loor, where the three of us spent several hours going through Ewing’s materials, a process that archivists like Hinderliter call “a rough sort.”

At one point, Ewing unfolded a tiny triangle of notepaper, folded like origami, from her high school days at Northside

College Prep. She read it, laughed, and folded it back up again—should we keep these notes about high school crushes?

We also discussed Ewing’s digital collection. How might we preserve years of text messages between Ewing and famous fellow writers? And how do we protect the privacy of so many living people?

We asked Ewing how long she would like to keep some materials restricted, in order to protect the privacy of her correspondents. She asked for 75 years. That means that her letters, emails, and texts will be closed until November 13, 2094. “Hopefully I won’t live to be 107,” Ewing told me, “or I’ll have a lot of awkward conversations to handle when the appointed date for them to go public rolls around.”

As for all of Ewing’s messages and interactions that are “born-digital,” the Newberry continues to develop the technological tools and staff expertise to preserve this material.

Perhaps most importantly, our discussions with Ewing will be ongoing, as digital materials require trust between the creator of an archive and the archive’s keeper. The ephemerality of digital messages, the passwords required for access, and the planned obsolescence of computers, phones, and storage devices require archivists to think about the preservation of historic documents in ways that go beyond paper or book conservation.

Recently, I was inspired to ask Ewing to compose new poems for an upcoming Newberry exhibition called Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time (on view at the Newberry from September 10 through December 30, 2021).

The exhibition will illuminate the work of five women who took radical risks in their lives and in their art: dancer Ruth Page, art dealer and curator Katharine Kuh, dancer Katherine Dunham, painter Gertrude Abercrombie, and poet Gwendolyn Brooks. The women of Chicago Avant-Garde creatively and often subversively challenged constrictions on their lives, especially the limitations placed on them because of their gender. They were committed to making and supporting provocative art that would activate social change. They created a cultural landscape in Chicago and a mode of being ahead of the times that seems, to my mind, a striking precursor to Ewing.

During the pandemic, I sent Ewing emails full of digitized material about the women of Chicago AvantGarde, including postcards, photographs, dance clips, and correspondence. Out of this archive of material, Ewing The Newberry Magazine

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“ The Newberry has been an impressive archival steward, and I have all the faith in the world that the institution will care for my materials long after I’m gone.” produced five new poems, based upon a moment in the life of each woman. These poems will be included in the catalogue for Chicago Avant-Garde.

One of Ewing’s new poems focuses on Gwendolyn Brooks in the moments before she found out that she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Another poem, titled “that morning,” imagines Katharine Kuh coming into her gallery to find the windows shattered, likely the work of a vigilante group that hated modern art. Another poem rethinks something Ruth Page said about classical ballet in an interview with Studs Terkel: “You have to look fragile, but not be fragile.” Two surrealist paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie inspired a poem with the opening line, “the tree weeps, bark split from the last storm.” And in a moving poem titled “Steps of the Gods,” Ewing imagines Katherine Dunham observing dancers in Haiti, an epiphany moment, catalyzing Dunham’s key decision to pursue a life in dance.

Ewing’s papers have found a repository in the center of Chicago, free and open to the public, where they will be preserved and accessible to a wide range of readers. “The Newberry has been an impressive archival steward, and I have all the faith in the world that the institution will care for my materials long after I’m gone,” Left to right: Gertrude Abercrombie, Katherine Dunham, Katharine Kuh, Ruth Page, and Gwendolyn Brooks, the subjects of an upcoming Newberry exhibition titled Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time, are the inspiration for five new poems by Eve Ewing.

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Ewing told me. She also added, “But my real reason for donating my papers to the Newberry is … I hate clutter and I don’t want them in my house!” This is not the first time that the Newberry has benefited from good housekeeping. Just consult the papers of journalist, playwright, and screenwriter Ben Hecht.

Ewing’s papers complement and amplify other Newberry collections related to the cultural life of Chicago, especially many collections that illuminate the historical links between art and activism. Perhaps one day, in 2094, students will arrive at the library looking for connections between the riots of 1919 and the pandemic of 2020. Or a scholar might seek voices from the arts that register the impact of social inequality upon the lives of young people. Or a curious reader might come to the library looking to understand the process through which poetry gets made. These visitors to the Newberry will find plenty of material in the newly opened papers of Eve L. Ewing, an extraordinary thinker who knows enough to see forward into the future.

Liesl Olson is Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry. She is the author of Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis.

Independence Days

By Matthew Clarke

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ometime during the first half of the eighteenth century, a group of Nahua people from Zempoala, a village in what is now the Mexican state of Hidalgo, resisted Spanish claims to the land by presenting a claim of their own. They made their case with a book, which they may have believed to be the most effective way of appealing to the colonial powers. Using amatl, a bark paper dating from precolonial times, the Nahua people created a “land book” documenting their ownership of the area surrounding the village. They left the book’s pages rough in order to signal the ancient nature of their claims.

This land book, known as the Codex Zempoala, is on display in the Newberry’s current exhibition, ¡Viva la Libertad! Latin America and the Age of Revolutions. Funded by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation and on view

The Codex Zempoala—a “land book” made by Nahua people in the eighteenth century—is featured in ¡Viva la Libertad!, a Newberry exhibition open through July 24.

In addition to rare books and manuscripts, the exhibition features engravings, cartoons, newly created artwork, and a video installation. Photo by Anne Ryan The Newberry Magazine

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According to the conventional narrative of the Age of Revolutions, the revolution in the United States in 1776 lit the torch of liberty, valiantly leading the way for the rest of the hemisphere. ¡Viva la Libertad! challenges this narrative of exceptionalism, revealing the complex roots of multiple independence movements throughout the Americas. through July 24, the exhibition tells stories about how people across the Americas fought colonial rule, established independence, and embarked on the difficult work of governing their diverse populations.

According to the conventional narrative of the Age of Revolutions, the revolution in the United States in 1776 lit the torch of liberty, valiantly leading the way for the rest of the hemisphere. ¡Viva la Libertad! challenges this narrative of exceptionalism, revealing the complex roots of multiple independence movements throughout the Americas.

“The American Revolution was one of many struggles for independence from European empires during the Age of Revolutions,” says Will Hansen, the exhibition’s curator and the Newberry’s Director of Reader Services. “The aim of the exhibition is to show the connections between the many revolutions during this formative period and to help visitors understand how this history continues to shape life in the Americas.”

A range of exhibition materials from the Newberry collection underscores both the complexity of the Age of Revolutions and its ongoing legacy today. Visitors will see colonial-era maps, Indigenous manuscripts, manifestos, letters, and contemporary poster art exploring themes of territory, borders, and identity.

The Newberry’s extensive collection on the history of the Americas has been developed over the course of the library’s history and continues to grow today through both donations and purchases. The library also holds important collections of European materials that broaden geographic perspectives on the era—including 30,000 Revolutionary-era French pamphlets and 2,000 manuscript documents related to Napoleon. One letter by Napoleon in the Newberry collection is on display in ¡Viva la Libertad!

The exhibition’s themes are being amplified by a series of programs taking place throughout 2021 and 2022. Funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the series—titled ¡Viva la Libertad! Forming More Perfect Unions Across the Americas—consists of nine programs, including a participatory event about the historical practice of 12

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lifting a glass and toasting revolutions, a writing workshop that will give high school students the opportunity to draft their own personal declarations of independence, and a bike tour of public art inspired by freedom struggles in Latin America.

The engaging collection items on display in the exhibition anchor the project. Individually, these items have offered researchers a glimpse into colonial-era life in Latin America.

Gathered together and arranged in the Newberry galleries, they present a panoramic view of a turbulent period that was at once inspiring, tragic, heroic, violent, and hopeful.

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rom the standpoint of American exceptionalism, the history of the Age of Revolutions goes something like this: inspired

by Enlightenment ideals and tax grievances, a rag-tag army of scrappy colonists in the British territories of North America won independence from the world’s most powerful empire, sparking a movement that spread across the region, and indeed the world.

The reality, of course, is more complicated. Yes, the United States was the first country in the region to declare independence from a colonial power, and it offered inspiration to other nascent independence movements in Latin America.

Yet it was only one of many countries in the Americas to undertake a struggle for independence, and its experience was far from normative—a fact frequently overshadowed by exceptionalist ideology. ¡Viva la Libertad! shifts the spotlight from the United States to the Americas as a whole.

The exhibition’s opening section, “Colonial Context,” provides background information on the period while posing questions like What does it mean to declare independence? Who is included and who is left out? In addition to a large timeline covering important dates, events, and figures of the period, the section includes items related to enslavement and the slave trade, Indigenous power and resistance, colonial bureaucracies and economies, and the racial caste system implemented by European colonists. Alongside the Codex Zempoala, it features a lateeighteenth-century broadsheet depicting the interior of a slave ship. Printed in London, the diagram was used by abolitionists in their successful bid to turn the British public against slavery.

“It is important to remember that slavery was part of the Europeans’ so-called ‘New World’ from the very beginning of colonialism,” says Hansen. “As early as 1501, Spanish colonists were transporting enslaved Africans to Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). But it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that abolition really gained a foothold in countries like Great Britain, in part due to the circulation of print materials that shocked audiences and revealed the horrors of slavery. Description of a Slave Ship is one famous example. Without a doubt, it’s one of the most powerful items in our collection. We decided to hang it in a niche at the back of the first gallery to give visitors a more intimate, private space for ref lection.”

“Revolutionary Rumblings,” the exhibition’s next section, focuses on the connections between independence struggles in Latin America and revolutions in the United States, Haiti, and France. Among many other materials, visitors will see a book compiled by Vicente Rocafuerte, an Ecuadorian patriot who became president of the country when it gained independence in the 1830s. Published in Philadelphia in 1821, the book anthologized Spanish translations of important political documents from the United States—the Constitution and Articles of Confederation, as well as works by Thomas Paine and John Quincy Adams—and was intended to be smuggled into Latin America, where it would provide Spanish-speaking audiences with blueprints for republicanism.

Printed in London at the end of the eighteenth century, this diagram of a slave ship was used by British abolitionists to reveal the horrors of slavery.

Created to preserve the poetry and songs of the Argentinian independence movement, La Lira Argentina includes a foldout musical plate recording the Argentinian national anthem.

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The last two sections, “Powers of the Peoples” and “Liberty’s Promise, Liberty’s Problems,” highlight the cultural, religious, political, military, and transatlantic dimensions of the era’s revolutionary struggles as well as their continued relevance today. Alongside items related to major figures in Latin American independence movements—Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and José Antonio Paez, among others—the sections include a manuscript letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to his stepson recounting his occupation of Spain and his removal of the Spanish royal family, events that galvanized independence movements in Latin America. Visitors also have the opportunity to see the first book of Argentinian poetry, La Lira Argentina (The Argentinian Lyre).

“La Lira Argentina was created to preserve the poetry and songs that were created during the independence struggle in Argentina,” says Hansen. “It’s a fascinating work, with a foldout musical plate recording the Argentinian national anthem, and wonderful examples of gaucho poetry, in which stock gaucho characters discuss the events of the day and provide some political education to the undereducated classes.”

The exhibition also includes a group of three stunning maps, including one depicting the United States and Mexico.

Created in 1847 in the midst of the Mexican-American War, the so-called Disturnell map was consulted by officials after the war as they redrew national boundaries.

One of three stunning maps in the exhibition, the so-called Disturnell map was used by Mexican and United States officials to redraw the borders of the two countries after the Mexican-American War.

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“It’s impossible to overstate the historical significance of the Disturnell map,” explains Hansen. “It was never a great work of cartography; it included many inaccuracies. But in 1848, when Mexican and American representatives met to end the MexicanAmerican War, they relied on the Disturnell map to determine the border between the two countries. In fact, Article V of the resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—the article where Mexico tacitly ceded Texas and much of the rest of the Southwest to the United States—refers directly to the map.” ¡Viva la Libertad! also includes a series of newly created portraits introducing visitors to forgotten or lesser-known actors in the revolutionary struggles of the Americas. One features Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua, an eighteenth-century mixed-race woman now celebrated in Peru for her role in fighting for Indigenous rights alongside her better-known husband, the Incan leader Túpac Amaru II. Another portrait honors Leona Vicario, a heroine of the Mexican War of Independence.

Visitors to the exhibition are also greeted by a selection of recently acquired prints by contemporary artists ref lecting on themes like liberty, identity, and borders. The product of collaboration among artists from Mexico and the United States, the prints were recently acquired by the Newberry and serve as a reminder that the struggles of the Age of Revolutions are in many cases ongoing.

The exhibition includes a selection of recently acquired prints by contemporary artists that ref lect on exhibition themes like liberty, identity, and borders.

Photo by Anne Ryan

T

he program series being held in association with the exhibition builds on the Newberry’s recent citywide collaborative project commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots. ¡Viva la Libertad! Forming More Perfect Unions Across the Americas integrates participatory formats and resources from the Newberry’s collections to encourage public conversation and personal ref lection about Latin American independence.

In May, for example, high school students from Chicago’s Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy recited their own declarations of This portrait of Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua independence inspired —a mixed-race woman who fought for by the foundational Indigenous rights in eighteenth-century documents of the Peru—is one of the newly created artworks

American, Haitian, Venezuelan, and Mexican independence movements. Based on historical research, and with assistance from Newberry staff, the students workshopped their own statements in advance and then shared them with the public.

“We’re thrilled to bring together such a diverse group of speakers for this array of programs,” said Karen Christianson, Director of Public Engagement at the Newberry. “With this series, we hope to provide audiences across Chicago and beyond with many ways to engage with a fascinating era that still shapes our lives today. From writing workshops and bike rides to scholarly talks, public conversations, gallery tours, and even a performance of historical toasts, the series truly offers something for everyone.”

We hope you’ll join us in raising a glass, in person or virtually: ¡Viva la Libertad!

Matthew Clarke is Communications Coordinator at the Newberry.

Visit digital.newberry.org/libertad for more information about the project.

that appear in the exhibition.

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Family Lore

By Matthew Clarke

N

othing beats the thrill of pursuing the secrets of the past—especially your own family’s past. Whether scouring archives, discovering old letters, or consulting with relatives, the process of piecing together your personal history is what makes genealogy so exciting.

But once you’ve made your discoveries, what do you do next?

Matt Nickerson has an answer: write a story. A private historian, Nickerson helps families turn their genealogies into compelling narratives that they can share as books, websites, or videos. A former reporter and editor with two degrees in history, he wears many hats. Last fall he donned another when he taught “Secrets in the Tree,” a writing-focused genealogy seminar offered through the Newberry’s Adult Education Seminar Program.

Genealogy seminars are among the most popular courses in this Newberry program, which offers affordable, non-credit seminars across a wide range of subjects in the humanities.

Usually, genealogy seminars introduce budding genealogists to the field, acquainting them with research methods and online databases as well as the unique genealogical materials available at the Newberry, one of the leading centers in the United States for genealogical research.

By contrast, Nickerson designed “Secrets in the Tree” for those who had already conducted much of their research and wanted help turning their discoveries into a story.

“The purpose of the seminar was to teach people to write family history,” says Nickerson. “In my mind, family history is no different from any other type of history—it’s just done on a smaller scale. And the aims are the same as any other type of history: to enrich our lives with stories and help us learn from the past.”

Over four course sessions, students honed their skills using newspaper archives, census reports, and county records while also learning how to conduct interviews, identify and engage audiences, and meet deadlines. All this work culminated in each student writing an essay narrating an episode in their family’s history.

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Like other adult education seminars during this pandemic year, “Secrets in the Tree” met using Zoom, allowing students from across the country to participate.

“In a time when we’re unable to safely gather in a classroom, virtual seminars have been an invaluable mode of connection, bringing together learners across the United States and the world,” said Sarah Wilson, the Newberry’s Seminars Manager. “Seminars like Matt’s have widened our community and allowed new participants to experience our collections while also making connections with each other.”

During the seminar’s first session, each student presented an artifact from their family’s past. Cherished heirlooms, these objects introduced the students to one another and anchored the narratives they would develop as part of the class.

One student held up a blues album recorded by a relative.

Another shared family recipes that had been passed down from one generation to the next. A third displayed a rif le from the Civil War. Soon, the students were off, planning, organizing, drafting—and making some important discoveries along the way. Just ask Helen Murray, Lance Potter, and Lauren Young.

H

elen Murray is a Chicagoan through and through.

Raised in the near western suburbs, Murray, now in her late seventies, has lived in the city for the past fifty years, working first as a community organizer and then as a high school history teacher. She comes from a long line of Chicagoans, her immigrant ancestors having settled in the city in the 1800s. She also comes from a long line of storytellers.

“I was raised in a family that told stories,” Murray explains.

“There were many stories about the lives of grandparents and great-grandparents: where they’d lived before immigrating to the United States and what happened when they arrived and afterwards. I loved these stories, and often asked questions about the details.”

A photo of the Murray family taken in Joliet, Illinois, in 1890. Nellie Murray is in the back row, second from the left. Ellen Dixon Murray and John Burns Murray are the middle two adults seated in the front row.

An especially intriguing story involved a lawsuit that occurred soon after Murray’s family arrived in the United States. The details were hazy; according to family legend, Murray’s great-aunt had been involved in a horrific railroad accident as a young girl in Bloomington, Illinois. The family, represented by Adlai Stevenson, a future vice president of the United States then at the very beginning of his career, successfully sued the railroad company.

Could this family lore be true, Murray wondered? Earlier in her research, Murray had found partial copies of transcripts of trials involving the case as it moved through the court system. She had always wanted to do the intensive research required to learn more, but life got in the way, and she was forced to set the project aside. Then one day she received an email from the Newberry promoting “Secrets in the Tree.” She realized that the seminar might offer the opportunity she had been waiting for.

“I thought I could use Matt’s course as an inspiration to get back to this unfinished project,” Murray says. “I was also looking for help in better focusing my future research. And I thought Matt’s writing background would be a real asset.”

Soon enough, Murray was off and running, tracking down missing details in old newspapers and scouring the court records of McLean County, where Bloomington is located, and the State of Illinois. In short order, she had supplemented her existing research with new information and had completed a first draft of her story.

Coming into the seminar, Murray had known a good deal about her family’s arrival in the United States. Her paternal greatgrandfather, John Burns Murray, emigrated from Ireland in 1849.

Fifteen years later, in 1864, John moved from Duchess County, New York, to Bloomington, Illinois, taking a job as a machinist for the Chicago & Alton Railway (C&A). He had married another immigrant, Ellen Dixon, in New York, and the couple had three children. Then, just a few years after their move, tragedy struck.

As Murray writes in her essay: One hot July afternoon in 1870, Ellen asked their seven-yearold daughter Nellie to fetch the daily paper. Protected by the sun in her Shaker bonnet, Nellie waited for the watchman’s signal to cross the many tracks that led in and out of the Chicago & Alton train yard. She knew the routine, as did all the local pedestrians. After she got the go-ahead from the lone watchman to cross half-way she did so and waited. While positioned where she’d been sent and waiting for the okay to continue, a slow-moving engine and tender began backing up. Before she had a chance to react, Nellie’s leg was pulled under one of the tender’s wheels and she was terribly injured.

The butcher across the street watched the event and ran to assist her. It was his wagon that carried the child to her home, where she was laid upon a feather bed on the parlor floor. Two doctors were called. One of them removed her dangling leg and two fingers of her injured hand. For days the child was delirious, tended to night and day by her parents.

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the Murray Building—a mixed-use apartment building erected in 1885 at Chicago and Cass Avenues—still stands.

In addition to giving Murray time to focus on the project, the seminar led to important research developments.

For example, the transcripts she had previously unearthed provided fascinating insight into the legal proceedings, documenting Stevenson’s role in the case. Yet parts of Murray’s copy had always been illegible. Thankfully, through research she conducted during the seminar, she was finally able to acquire complete copies of the documents—a major step forward.

Murray credits the seminar with encouraging her to f inally write her essay. She has further research to do, she says, and she looks forward to visiting the Newberry and spending time with materials in the collection.

“When my research is finished, I intend to share the essay with other extended family members, and perhaps publish it in a history publication,” she says. In addition to advancing her own genealogy work, she appreciated the opportunity to learn about other students’ stories in the seminar. “In some ways, my favorite part of the course was learning about the interesting subjects and research of the other participants. Each had a unique American story to share.”

T This page from a transcript of the lawsuit unearthed by Helen Murray shows that the Murray family was represented by Adlai Stevenson’s f irm, Stevenson & Ewing.

The C&A was one of the most powerful railroads in the country, but that did not stop John from taking action. He went to the company’s headquarters in Chicago to request compensation and was rebuffed. He was undeterred, and he knew where to go for help.

“This very poor immigrant family made the life-changing decision to engage a local law firm,” writes Murray. “One of the partners was Adlai Stevenson I. Winning would be an uphill battle. The first court case was decided in the family’s favor. The railroad appealed. They then won a second time.

The C&A again appealed. Finally, the case was referred to the Illinois Supreme Court—and the family won. Nellie and the Murrays were awarded a settlement.”

In order to provide for Nellie, the family invested the settlement money in property in Bloomington and Joliet, where 18

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hat’s certainly true of Lance Potter. Now 64, Potter grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He spent much of his life in the hotel industry and is now an avid traveler.

“Travel is my life’s passion,” he says. “I’ve visited 123 countries.

Just before the pandemic kicked in last year, I was finishing my fifth around-the-world trip.”

The curiosity that draws him to travel may also be what led Potter to genealogy. His mother helped, too. She was the first in his family to research their history, amassing a collection of documents that included Civil War muster rolls discovered at the National Archives. Later, she passed these documents on to her son, alongside something else: a Civil War-era medal that had turned up in her own mother’s home in Lansing, Michigan.

The Potter family believed that the medal had been awarded to Potter’s great-great-grandfather, David Rife, for sharpshooting. Nobody knew for sure. Where did it come from?

When was it awarded? Was it really for sharpshooting? Potter took it upon himself to find answers.

Over the years, he had uncovered some details of his family tree, relying on family documents, census records,

This Civil War medal—bequeathed to Lance Potter by his mother—was awarded to Potter’s great-great-grandfather, David Rife, by the State of Ohio.

battle occurred on August 22, 1862, at Freeman’s Ford on the Rappahannock River in Virginia. Rife would fight with the 61st in the battles of Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and Atlanta. The regiment had started with 914 men. By the war’s end, only 60 remained. Rife was one of them.

This much Potter had known. After consulting the sources suggested by Nickerson, he unearthed new information: rather than escaping the war unscathed, Rife had been injured with a wound serious enough to send him to a hospital hundreds of miles away.

“After only nine months in the infantry, David was promoted to Corporal,” writes Potter. “His regiment participated in the Battle of Peachtree Creek during the Battle of Atlanta on July 20, 1864. Casualty reports show David sustained a ‘slight wound’ to the arm. ‘Slight’ seems to be a term used very loosely to indicate ‘not-life-threatening’— and little more. It is reported that two-thirds of arm and leg injuries ended with an amputation in the Civil War. This ‘slight wound’ sent him to the hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, for seven months.”

and the genealogy website Ancestry.com. In 2017, Potter attended a genealogy seminar led by the Newberry’s Curator of Genealogy and Local History, Matt Rutherford. “That seminar reinvigorated my interest in genealogy and made me aware of the resources at the Newberry,” Potter says.

Recognizing the value of these adult education seminars, he enrolled in another the following year, hosted by the Newberry and conducted by the Ulster Historical Foundation. The experience prompted a trip to Northern Ireland, where Potter made new discoveries about his family’s past. But he still had not solved the mystery of the Civil War medal.

Like Murray, Potter saw “Secrets in the Tree” as a chance to bring his project to fruition. In particular, he hoped the seminar would connect him with new materials that could shed light on the medal’s origin and the life of his great-great-grandfather.

His decision paid off. “Matt [Nickerson] led me to a number of sources I was not familiar with, including WorldCat, GoogleBooks, and Hathi Trust. He also directed me to county histories and histories of specific Civil War regiments, which proved very helpful.

Before the class, I had no idea how many sources were available online for free.” Soon, Potter had made a series of important discoveries about the exciting life of his great-great-grandfather, David Rife, and the medal he had inherited.

Potter already knew that Rife had been born in Ohio in 1840—one of ten children, all boys—and grew up working on his family’s farm. He also knew that during the Civil War, Rife had enlisted in the Ohio A page from the muster rolls used by Potter to trace the career of his great-greatVolunteer Infantry 61st Regiment. The regiment’s first grandfather during the Civil War.

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Further investigation revealed that two months after his arrival, Rife was well enough to begin helping out around the hospital. Soon, he had recovered and rejoined the army. By March 1865, he was back in North Carolina, where he fought in the Battle of Goldsboro.

It turns out that the medal awarded to Rife and passed down through the generations was not for sharpshooting.

Instead, it was a reenlistment medal awarded by the State of Ohio when he rejoined the army after his convalescence. The state awarded about 20,000 of these medals to soldiers who had signed up for a second tour of duty during the war.

When the war ended, Rife returned to Ohio. He married, had five daughters, and spent his life as a farmer in Walnut Township. The 1870 census shows Rife sharing a homestead and farm with an extended family, including an 86-year-old grandparent. Potter determined the location of the family’s property in Walnut Township. Using Ancestry.com, he even identified the house—still standing—that may have belonged to the family.

Since completing his essay about David Rife, Potter has begun a second piece about another ancestor. Eventually, he hopes to self-publish his family stories as a book. In the meantime, he is sharing his results with his brothers and cousins.

“Genealogy is like a lifeline for me,” he says. “It makes me feel connected to my ancestors and an ancient past. I feel knowing where my family came from has tremendously enriched my life.”

L

auren Young could not agree more. Originally from San Diego, she spent most of her career in education. In 1998, after serving as a faculty member in the College of Education at Michigan State University, Young joined the Spencer Foundation, a Chicagobased philanthropic organization that supports education initiatives.

As a program director, Young headed institutional programs in South Africa, Russia, and the United States, before retiring a few years ago. At 73, she is one of the oldest members of her large family and has taken it upon herself to fill in the gaps of its history for the benefit of younger relatives.

“I feel deeply the importance of creating and maintaining a record of those who came before us,” she says. “When times get hard—and especially for us African Americans times will be hard—I want younger family members and others to know about the character, faith, grit, and humanity of our ancestors that enabled them to persevere. My purpose is to pass on the family story and in so doing provide, to the extent that I can,

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some sense of the individuals who came before us—and add to the record of this country these names of individuals who helped to build it.”

Like Murray and Potter, Young was drawn to “Secrets in the Tree” when she first heard about the seminar last fall. She had a well-developed family tree and many stories, but she wanted to piece those stories together into a cohesive whole.

“I was looking for a way to create a narrative that presented information both from documents and records as well as from family recollections and stories. It seemed that ‘Secrets in the Tree’ would provide me direction on how to better do that.

And I was not disappointed.”

Young was especially interested in finding out more about her first known ancestor on her father’s side, Edmond Walls.

Family lore had it that Walls was enslaved in Virginia in the early nineteenth century and eventually f led with his wife to Canada via the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War, it was said, he returned to the United States, settling in Kansas.

Young had never seen any proof to confirm the story. She hoped the seminar would change that.

On the first day of the seminar, she joined others in sharing an heirloom from her family’s past: a yellow and brown baby’s quilt created by her grandmother 100 years ago and given to her when her own son was born. “The quilt is special because it is a rich artifact from a family that had so little,” she says. “It’s a wonderful reminder of the beauty that can be created with whatever is at hand.” The quilt was not associated with Walls, but Young felt it symbolized the family bonds that characterized ancestors like him.

Before the seminar, Young worried that she might not learn anything new about Walls. “He was an enslaved man in the 1800s, so I didn’t think that I would find much to add to the family lore,” she explains. But she was pleasantly surprised.

At Nickerson’s suggestion, she started searching through Canadian census reports and other historical directories for her ancestor. She soon found a record of Walls and his family in a nineteenth-century Ontario census report; they had settled a plot of land in Sandwich, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit, and had occupied a log cabin.

“I can’t describe the rush of emotion I got when I found the record of Edmond and his family in Ontario,” she says. “It confirmed an important part of the family story. And many other things also began to make sense.”

For example, Young’s family tree listed one of Edmond and Elizabeth’s sons, Waskey James, as having been born in Xenia, Ohio—a stop along an Underground Railroad route leading from Virginia to Ontario. If Edmond and his family f led to Canada, they likely took this route from Virginia, and Elizabeth had given birth to Waskey James along the way. Noting, too,

Left: A baby’s quilt created by Lauren Young’s grandmother and passed down to her.

Right: A late-nineteenth-century photo of Edmond and Elizabeth Baker Walls. Born into slavery in Virginia in the early nineteenth century, Edmond f led with his wife to Canada before returning to the United States after the Civil War.

that “Waskey” was not a family name —nor a name she had ever heard —Young began to suspect that the child had been named after somebody who had aided the family in Ohio.

By the end of the seminar, Young felt that she had established without a shadow of a doubt the truth of the family legend: Edmond Walls and his family had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. They had lived in Canada for about a decade. And they had returned to Kansas after the Civil War. “Constitutional amendments outlawing slavery and granting certain civil rights to Black American citizens were ratified during Edmond’s time in Canada,” Young writes. “Further, the Homestead Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, promised 160 acres of land in Kansas and other states to those who would live on the land, build a home, make improvements, and farm for five years. Visions of a more hospitable social environment, tales of rich soil and abundant crops, and stories of free land available in the Free State of John Brown pulled Edmond and his family back to the United States The gravestone of Edmond and Elizabeth at around 1874.”

Newbury Cemetery in Newbury, Kansas.

As part of the Newberry’s Adult Education Seminar Program, Young had completed a draft of her ancestor’s story, combining the narrative she had been told, the documents that had been handed down, and the evidence from the Canadian census reports, nineteenth-century Kansas newspapers, and other genealogical materials. Yet she’s far from done with the project. In the future, she intends to expand the story further.

“My plan is to create a book to share this family story with cousins and other family relatives, and perhaps others. My hope, too, is that some members of the family will pick up where I will leave off.”

Matthew Clarke is Communications Coordinator at the Newberry.

Registration is now open for the Summer 2021 term of the Newberry’s Adult Education Seminar Program.

Browse the schedule of classes at newberry.org/adult-education-seminars.

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Let the Chaos Happen A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H J E F F R E Y G I B SO N Sweet Bitter Love, presenting artist Jeffrey Gibson’s reflections on representations of Indigenous peoples in cultural institutions, is on display at the Newberry through September 18.

Responding to a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portraits by Eldridge Ayer Burbank in the Newberry collection, Gibson (a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) refutes the stereotypical imagery that has reinforced pernicious myths about Indigenous people for centuries. As they enter into critical dialogue

with the collections of the Newberry and the Field Museum, Gibson’s works attest to the resilience of Indigenous cultures.

Analú López (Guachichil/Xi´úi), Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian at the Newberry, recently spoke with Gibson about his evolution as an artist, the challenges of presenting the complexity of the past through art, and how his work might surface silenced voices in library and museum collections.

The following text has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sweet Bitter Love is a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library. It is an initiative of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, which is organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago. Presented on the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause features new and recontextualized work by more than twenty-eight visual artists, including Jeffrey Gibson, who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981. Toward Common Cause is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago.

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ANALÚ LÓPEZ: Tell our readers a little about yourself.

How did you initially become interested in art? How have you evolved since then as an artist?

AL: You work across so many different mediums and formats. How do you decide on the form a particular work of art will take when you’re creating?

JEFFREY GIBSON: I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid. Growing up, we moved around a lot because my dad served in the military and was stationed in Germany and Korea.

I always identified as being kind of nomadic, and drawing became a portable activity that I could carry with me. My parents and teachers cheered me on as well. So pretty early on I knew that I wanted to be an artist; I just didn’t know what that meant. It was an aspirational idea.

After initially enrolling at the University of Maryland (where painting was my third major, behind anthropology and archaeology), I started going to a community college outside Washington, DC. I wanted to prove I wasn’t directionless, I was just not doing the right thing. I spent as much time in the Art Department as I could. I really indulged in photography, sculpture, and watercolor and oil painting. A professor whom I trusted recommended I then go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there that I started understanding what it meant to establish a practice.

JG: If you don’t come from an arts background, when you think of art you’re likely to picture painting or sculpture.

My paintings from the early 2000s were totally abstract. My inspiration was bead work, basketry, and weaving. In my head, I was applying paint as if I were creating a woven fabric or adorning a textile. It confused people. When I talked about what the work was about, they’d say, “Oh, this looks like abstract expressionism. The story you’re telling is interesting, but I don’t see it in the painting.” It was out of that frustrating experience that I decided to stop referencing certain materials and actually use them in my work.

This also coincided with my traveling around the country to visit with traditional Indigenous artists. I realized that someone’s choice to make their own clothing—to live traditionally—was a kind of political choice of autonomy.

I developed a different appreciation for Indigenous artists’ commitment to craft. I started learning from these people and incorporating what I’d learned into my work. I think of it as

Jeffrey Gibson in his studio

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commissioning work from them: if someone was a quilt maker, I’d commission a quilt from them; if they were a silversmith, I’d commission a silver engraving.

In retrospect, I see this as the beginning of my focus on merging narratives and my own interests. I like to put different artistic traditions side by side—for example, teepee painting and German geometric abstraction. From there, I start trying to understand their similarities and strike a balance so those similarities can really surface.

AL: At first glance, people might see two contrasting visual styles and assume they have nothing to do with each other. But I love how your work brings out the similarities and shows people connections that they didn’t see initially. This brings me to my next question, which relates to the silences—the marginalized voices and the perspectives of the past—that exist in libraries and museums. Do you think art can surface these silences. And if so, how?

JG: I do think that’s a real possibility. History is overwhelming; it seems coherent, but when you really dive into it, it starts splintering so quickly. I realized at some point my job isn’t to try to control how the narrative rolls out of history.

You have to almost let the chaos happen. Two events that happened concurrently may not seem to have any relationship if you look at them side by side. But we have to assume there’s some relativity between them. If I focus on one thread of history, I’m perpetuating a false narrative. Whether it’s my agenda or someone else’s agenda, it’s not the truth. The truth is really messy, and it’s really uncontainable.

The challenge of working with archives, I think, is that you’re tempted to search for evidence that supports an argument.

As an artist, that’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is to collect everything into a stew.

AL: Native American and Indigenous peoples have often been portrayed in stereotypical ways that reinforce the myth of the “vanishing race.” This is certainly true of E. A. Burbank’s portraits of Indigenous figures. How would you say your work is pushing back on this notion?

JG: The Burbank portraits don’t show the truth of what was happening to Native people in that time period [late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries]. These paintings whitewashed the violence of settler colonialism, and they’ve inf luenced the way the public thinks about Native people. I’ve had to deal with that in my own lifetime.

Detail from Gibson’s Chief Pretty Eagle, which reframes (literally) a late nineteenth-century painting by E. A. Burbank. The Burbank portrait features Pretty Eagle (or Déaxitchish, in Crow), a war chief of the Crow honored for his prowess in battle.

Initially, I thought it was my responsibility to honor the people in the portraits. But then I started seeing the portraits as intersections of many narratives. And I am my own intersection.

I thought how, with artists, whatever we make is truly a ref lection of us. I eventually realized that what I’m making in response to Burbank is about me; it’s not about the individuals in those portraits. That entails accepting a self-centeredness that I think of as human nature.

And so I’m not so much pushing back on the Burbank portraits as trying to open them up. Hopefully, this may help people understand that everything can be a launching point for us to move from. The threads that are coming through are looking at all the elements that have led to who I am in relationship to this type of portraiture.

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Details from Gibson’s Chief Pretty Eagle. Gibson poses questions and recontextualizes a range of stereotypical images of Native people.

AL: What drew you to engage with the Burbank portraits in particular? Why not something else in the Newberry collection?

JG: Well, part of it was that I’m a painter, and I’m familiar with this kind of painting—including not only the work of Burbank but of someone like George Catlin, too. These painters have always interested me because I’ve wondered What would I do with their work? Would I riff off it in some way? As I’ve gotten more mature as an artist, I’ve given in to the fact that I really am process-based—meaning I don’t know what the finished product is going to be. It’s a process of pushing the work to one point, putting it aside, picking it up again, and continuing until it arrives at a point where I can say, “Okay, this is everything coming together.”

When I started looking into the archives, it was such an overwhelming experience. Each document I picked up had its own story. One image that I kept returning to was trains. The reason trains were important to me was that the building of the railroads is what def ined a lot of relocation and removal acts affecting Indigenous communities. Being

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from Mississippi and Oklahoma, this history intersected with my own personal history. My great-grandfathers spent their lives building something that would tear apart their communities.

Ultimately, I didn’t feel I could make a whole body of work about trains. The Burbank portraits offered the kind of collective subject matter I felt I could approach.

AL: As you might already know, railroads were central to the life and career of Edward E. Ayer (a Newberry benefactor and uncle of E. A. Burbank). Ayer supplied lumber to the railroads. He used his wealth to build a personal collection related to American Indian history and culture, which would eventually become one of the foundational collections at the Newberry. That’s another interesting narrative that can be pulled from your engagement with Burbank.

JG: Even if the work itself doesn’t bring that out, hopefully conversations like this one around my work can send people into other directions.

IN MEMORIAM

Morrell M. Shoemaker A Lifelong Friend of Libraries

By Caroline Carter

W

hen Morrell Shoemaker’s family moved to Martins Ferry, Ohio, in the late 1920s, it was a steel mill town in its prime. “We were there a couple of years when the Depression came,” he told the Caxtonian in 2006. (The Caxtonian is a journal published by the Caxton Club, Chicago’s premier bibliophilic society.) “When the mills all shut down, there were so many people hanging around on street corners, out of work.” Across the river in Wheeling, West Virginia, stood a public library, but using it wasn’t free—not for Ohioans, at least.

The residents of Martins Ferry resolved to open a library of their own. “They got all the schoolchildren they could to go out and solicit books from everybody in town,” recalled Shoemaker, who was in elementary school at the time. “It was very good, because it got a lot of people a place that they’d go during the day, and they served coffee, and you could read newspapers.”

As the library met existing needs, it brought the community together in new ways. “A lot of [users] were first-generation

people coming over from Hungary and southern Italy and such,” Shoemaker explained. “And it got the community interested in these people in an essential way, and they taught them English.”

Shoemaker spent much of his adolescence in the new Martins Ferry Public Library, reading the latest additions to the collection. “I always had a very close feeling to it because I helped start it by bringing my little wagon full of books,” he said.

His fondness for books and libraries never dimmed. Since 1983, Morrell Shoemaker has donated generously to the Newberry, and though he passed away on September 22, 2020, at age 97, his estate continues to support our work.

Soon after graduating from Cornell University in 1945 with a degree in architecture, Shoemaker came to Chicago, promptly joining the Fourth Presbyterian Church just a few blocks from the Newberry. A half hour’s stroll to the south, he worked as a partner at an architectural firm. Shoemaker never owned a car, preferring to walk the city well into his nineties.

“I remember clearly that I heard about him before I met him,” says Paul Gehl, Curator Emeritus at the Newberry and a friend of Shoemaker’s for more than 30 years. “Evelyn Lampe, who helped start the Newberry Library Book Fair in the 1980s, told me she had this wonderful volunteer, an architect who planned layouts for the sales room.”

“Like many Newberry volunteers, Morrell brought a unique expertise to Book Fair,” says Manager of Volunteers Rebecca Haynes. She adds that although Shoemaker last volunteered in 2009, his impact continues to be felt. “I think that as a book-lover, he understood how excited people

Photo of a young Morrell Shoemaker, provided by his nephew Tom Hage.

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“ I like the Newberry very much. It’s pulled people of very diverse, varied backgrounds together, and everybody gets along; there’s very little one-upmanship.”

He then added with his typical good humor, “The junior librarians know more than the people who own the expensive books. So there’s a trade-off there.” could get about the event, and as an architect, he helped design layouts that balanced that love for shelves upon shelves of books with functionality. From everything I’ve heard, he did a lot to get Book Fair on its feet.”

Shoemaker became a permanent fixture at Newberry events. Often one of the first in the room at public programs, colloquiums, and donor receptions, he was recognizable to all. His warm nature and good humor attracted even the most introverted Newberrians. Even after he became unable to make the short walk to the library from his home in The Clare, Shoemaker attended every Newberry talk held at the senior living community. “Morrell was such a welcome presence at Newberry functions,” recalls Newberry Trustee Janis W. Notz.

“It didn’t feel like a true Newberry event if Morrell was not there. He will be deeply missed.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he joined Notz, Gehl, and other Newberrians for trips to visit libraries and book artists abroad. Gehl says that although Shoemaker was almost invariably the oldest member of the group, he’d never take a seat until all others were accommodated. He recalls one such trip to Milan when the group took a tram to see Catherine Malfitano sing at La Scala—one of the few instances that Shoemaker elected to use transit rather than his own feet. “He and I would gladly have walked to the opera house,” says Gehl. “But so the others would have the experience of Milan’s vintage trams, he seconded my suggestion that we all go that way. The creaky car with wooden seats was predictably full of elegant operagoers. Just as predictably, Morrell grabbed a strap and refused to sit down.”

Shoemaker frequented a variety of cultural institutions across the city, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Lyric Opera. But his involvement with the Newberry and the Caxton Club ref lected an abiding love for books—especially those about urban history and city planning. Thanks to Shoemaker’s generous bequest, part of this collection is now being added to the Newberry’s holdings.

“The materials he gave ref lect his lifelong fascination with the history of urban architecture and cities in general,” says Curator of Maps James R. Akerman. “Among the treasures are several nineteenth-century guidebooks to European and American cities, including an 1873 English edition of the HandyGuide to Vienna by B. Bucher and K. Weiss, which contains a foldout compilation of the f loor and seating plans of seven 28

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Viennese theaters.” Another gem, he says, is an 1836 copy of Guide to New York that contains both map and manuscript: “It caught my eye because it has inscribed in ink on the back f lyleaf the address of and directions to a location that the original owners were seeking out.” These rare materials, along with an unrestricted gift of funds that Shoemaker instructed be made from his estate, will contribute to the work of many researchers in the coming decades.

Morrell Shoemaker was much beloved by all at the Newberry. He and his wagon of books may have helped to start the Martins Ferry Public Library, but his support and engagement over the past four decades have been integral to sustaining the Newberry and advancing its mission. Through his generous estate gift, he will help us continue this work.

“In his words and actions, Morrell spoke to the core of the Newberry’s mission: to bring different people together to think deeply about our shared human story,” says President Daniel Greene. “He will be remembered with great affection for his warmth, his humility, and his curiosity—all traits we aspire to embody as an institution.”

“I like the Newberry very much,” Shoemaker told the Caxtonian. “It’s pulled people of very diverse, varied backgrounds together, and everybody gets along; there’s very little oneupmanship.” He then added with his typical good humor, “The junior librarians know more than the people who own the expensive books. So there’s a trade-off there.”

Caroline Carter is Donor Relations and Communications Coordinator at the Newberry.

MAKE A LASTING IMPACT Leave a gift to the Newberry in your will or trust to ensure that future generations will benefit from the Newberry’s educational opportunities and resources.

Please contact Natalie Edwards, Director of Major and Planned Giving, at edwardsn@newberry.org or (312) 255-3544 to begin a conversation.

IN MEMORIAM

Jan Reiff

By Daniel Greene

J

anice Reiff passed away suddenly on Tuesday, May 4, in Los Angeles. Jan was a Professor of History at UCLA and had a long association with the Newberry as a staff member, fellow, editor, teacher, and scholar.

A member of the Newberry staff in various capacities between the late 1970s and 1984, Jan worked on multiple projects in the library even as she earned her PhD from the University of Washington. Most notably during those years, Jan served as the Project Director of the Newberry’s Pullman Project and as both Associate Director and Co-Director of the Family and Community History Center (which became the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History and then the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture). She returned to the Newberry as a National Endowment for the Humanities/ Lloyd Lewis Long-Term Fellow in 1991, and later served on the Newberry’s Long-Term fellowship review panels in both 2004 and 2009.

With James R. Grossman and Ann Durkin Keating, Reiff co-edited The Encyclopedia of Chicago, a project that anchored the Scholl Center for many years. The Encyclopedia of Chicago was published by the University of Chicago Press

in 2004; Jan was the lead editor on the digital edition, launched in 2005. She also edited a volume, Chicago Business and Industry: From Fur Trade to E-Commerce (2013), drawing on research from The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Notable among Professor Reiff ’s other publications are: Structuring the Past: The Use of Computers in History (American Historical Association, 1991); Digitizing the Past: The Use of Computers and Communications Technologies in History (American Historical Association, 1999); and, with Helen Hornbeck Tanner, The Settling of North America: The Atlas of the Great Migrations into North America from the Ice Age to the Present (Macmillian, 1995).

On a personal note, as Director of the Scholl Center in 2011, I had the chance to work closely with Jan on “Pullman: Labor, Race, and the Urban Landscape in a Company Town,” a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for Community College Faculty funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jan was the lead scholar on that workshop, a compassionate and interested teacher of her students and peers, and a wonderful tour guide through the streets of Pullman.

Jan will be deeply missed.

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RETROSPECT

Recent Events THE MANY LIVES OF BEN HECHT Newspaperman. Novelist. Playwright. Activist. Best known for his work as an Oscar-winning screenwriter, Ben Hecht was a remarkably prolific artist whose career and work spanned different media, styles, and genres. This March, the Newberry hosted a virtual Conversation at the Newberry between New Yorker staff writer and film critic David Denby and essayist, biographer, and scholar Adina Hoffman about the many lives of Hecht, whose papers are held by the library. Denby and Hoffman discussed Hecht’s varied life, including his early days as a “picture-chaser” at a Chicago newspaper in the early twentieth century, his stint as a novelist, and his remarkable transformation into “the greatest American screenwriter,” according to film critic Pauline Kael. In addition to discussing Hecht’s work in film—a medium he excelled in but detested— Denby and Hoffman explored his experience as an outspoken activist on behalf of Jewish causes and his complicated relationships with women.

Conversations at the Newberry is made possible by Sue and Melvin Gray.

IMAGINING THE END WITH JONATHAN LEAR How do our fears of catastrophe—whether of political collapse, ecological crisis, or global pandemic—shape the ways we imagine the purposes of human life? This question was the focus of “Imagining the End,” a series of three lectures delivered this year by University of Chicago philosopher Jonathan Lear. Inaugurating the Newberry’s David L. Wagner Distinguished Lectureship for Humanistic Inquiry Series, Lear’s talks ranged in focus from the role of mourning in our lives to how the pandemic has shaped our thinking about the human condition. In the last lecture of the series, in early April, Lear addressed the ways that exemplary figures can serve as sources of resilience and durability during challenging times.

As in his previous talks, Lear—who in addition to holding a PhD is a trained psychoanalyst—drew on insights from psychoanalysis as well as philosophers and other writers to help illuminate the impact of the pandemic on our lives while offering thoughtful and welcome words of solace.

The David L. Wagner Distinguished Lectureship for Humanistic Inquiry Series is funded by David L. Wagner and Renie B. Adams.

Recordings of programs are available on the Newberry’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/thenewberrylibrary

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DECLARING INDEPENDENCE What does it mean to declare independence? What belongs in such a declaration? How do you write one? These questions are at the heart of the Newberry’s new exhibition, ¡Viva la Libertad! This spring, students from Chicago’s Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy (IJLA) wrestled with such questions directly by engaging with Newberry materials—including American, Haitian, Venezuelan, and Mexican declarations of independence—while formulating personal declarations of independence inspired by the materials they encountered. On May 20, the students gathered to present thoughts about their experiences and share their own declarations in “Declaring Independence.” Following a discussion of the history of nineteenth-century independence movements in the Americas by scholar Jordana Dym and an overview of the project by IJLA teacher Anton Miglietta, students and other participants separated into breakout rooms, where they discussed what they learned and recited their declarations.

After reconvening as a group, viewers were invited to respond to students by posting comments and reactions.

This program as part of ¡Viva la Libertad! has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

LONNIE G. BUNCH III RECEIVES 2021 NEWBERRY LIBRARY AWARD In a virtual celebration held May 24, the Newberry presented the 2021 Newberry Library Award to Lonnie G. Bunch III in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the humanities.

As Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Bunch oversees 21 libraries, 19 museums, the National Zoo, and several research organizations and education centers. Before becoming Secretary in 2019, Bunch was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the country’s largest cultural institution dedicated to documenting African American stories and exploring their place in American and world history.

“Throughout his career, Lonnie Bunch has harnessed the power of the humanities to challenge and enrich our understanding of ourselves and our collective relationship with the past and present,” said Daniel Greene, President and Librarian of the Newberry. “From his early work as a scholar, teacher, and curator to his achievements as director of the NMAAHC and head of the Smithsonian Institution, Secretary Bunch has advanced the public humanities and promoted values that are so important to us at the Newberry: truth, inquiry, equity, and civic engagement.”

“The Newberry has long been an inspiration to me as a place that values, supports, and advances public access to history,” said Bunch as he accepted the award.

“I am humbled to receive the 2021 Newberry Library Award. In honoring me, this award honors the power of history to help our country understand itself and grow stronger.”

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PROSPECT

Upcoming Events Since the Newberry’s founding in 1887, the library has offered free programs in the humanities for people throughout the Chicago area and beyond. Today, you can explore history, literature, music, and the arts through public lectures, meet-the-author events, exhibitions, seminars, and other online programs.

Register to attend these free virtual programs online at newberry.org/public-programs.

JUNE

Experimental Jazz from the Chicago Renaissance to the Present

Black Freedom on Native Land

A conversation between scholar Romi Crawford and groundbreaking musicians Terri Lyne Carrington and Nicole Mitchell about experimentation, early jazz inf luences, and their latest work.

Monday, June 21, 4–5pm CT

Meet-the-author event with scholar Alaina Roberts about her new book, which examines the ways Indigenous peoples, freed African Americans, and white settlers negotiated claims to land during the period of westward expansion following the Civil War. Wednesday, June 2, 4–5pm CT

America’s First Civil Rights Movement Meet-the-author event with scholar Kate Masur, whose new book reconsiders the history of the nation’s earliest federal civil rights measures: the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Thursday, June 10, 4–5pm CT

Revolutions Across Borders Part of our ¡Viva la Libertad! program series, a panel discussion about the connections between borderlands in the Americas, immigration, labor practices, Indigenous rights, the arms trade, resource extraction, and cartograph.

Tuesday, June 15, 4–5pm CT

Reclaiming Indigenous Material Culture A D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies program bringing together artist Jeffrey Gibson—whose work is featured in the Newberry’s exhibition Sweet Bitter Love—and anthropologist Sven Haakanson for a conversation about art, anthropology, and material culture.

Friday, June 18, 12–1pm CT

(Re)Indigenizing Spaces in Zhekagoynak Part of the Chicago Monuments Project, a conversation between artists, activists, and scholars about how public monuments relate to memory and history and how Indigenous spaces and futures can be reclaimed through action, performance, and art.

Tuesday, June 29, 5–6pm CT

NEWBERRY BOOK FAIR EXPRESS While we cannot welcome crowds to the library this summer for our annual Book Fair, shoppers can buy books by the box in our five most popular Book Fair categories!

• • • • •

Biography Cooking Fiction History Mystery

Reserve your book boxes online through the Newberry bookshop and pick them up curbside on July 30 and 31. bookshop.newberry.org

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SWEET BITTER love Jeffrey Gibson

May 28 – September 18

60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610 www.newberry.org

Unique books, cards, and gifts for bibliophiles

HOURS Wednesday through Saturday 12 – 4 pm Shop online anytime! bookshop.newberry.org