Download your very own archives month poster. (Please note that the poster takes awhile to open. Patience is required!)
Assembly directions: The poster is actually composed of 9 pages that should be hung together in a cube shape. Print them without resizing the pages, and you do not need to slice the white borders off: they were taken into consideration for the design. So basically just print and post! The poster looks fine in B&W, but for maximum effect it is best to print in color.
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“Ever wonder where artists, authors, screenwriters, and academics get their ideas?
A lot of them hang out in the archives.
We’ve got the historical letters, photographs, and diaries that feed new ideas.
Archives provide the inspiration.”
SRMA’s American Archives Month poster was an archival art project in itself this year!
We wanted to illustrate how creative individuals, scholars, and members of the public use archives as inspiration and for raw research material in their work.
Archives aren’t dusty repositories of dead information, but rather vast storehouses of useful facts, images, and other primary source material that is helpful in myriad ways. We collect and protect these materials, and offer free access to them, thereby contributing to the creation of new knowledge.
A great illustration of turning raw archival material into something new is the artist book assignment in Professor Mendelsberg’s Visual Sequencing course at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design (http://www.rmcad.edu/). You may read more about this project here (http://blogs.du.edu/today/news/living-history-on-display-in-books-based-on-penrose-archives).
In short, students are assigned the task of creating an artist book about any former tuberculosis patient at the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society, which was in operation in Denver from 1904 to 1954.
The JCRS just happened to be housed on the same campus where RMCAD now resides, but the JCRS patient files, photographs, objects and other archival materials are held by the Beck Archives at the Penrose Library, University of Denver (http://lib-anubis.cair.du.edu/specoll/Beck/index.cfm).
RMCAD students make a trip to DU to choose a patient from the JCRS files, then they investigate the background on their patient of choice, sometimes even tracking down relatives or doing genealogical research. They design and produce a book using what they have found on that patient’s life and time at the JCRS.
These books are alternately beautiful, engaging, funny, quirky, challenging, high-design, and simple. They are wonderful tributes to the lives of former Denverites.
The Visual Sequencing artist books become part of the collection at the RMCAD library. This is where one RMCAD student, Michael Arestad, captured images of stacks of these books, and combined them with a few JCRS photographs to design SRMA’s Archives Month poster.
Rather than a straight representation of the books, Michael designed a visually-engaging poster that illustrates its own message—artists gain inspiration from archives—in a somewhat unusual format. The nine separate pages are intended to be hung together in the shape of a larger square, drawing the passerby into the message itself.
Rather than just telling us that archives provide inspiration, the poster directly shows us.
If you’d like to share interesting projects or books that you or your researchers created using archival material, let us know! We’ll add a link to your project on this page.
–October 2011, Laura Ruttum Senturia
Thanks to Thyria Wilson and Jeanne Abrams at the DU Special Collections & Archives, and Hugh Thurlow at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design for contributing images for the poster and offering access to their collections. We’d also like to thank RMCAD professor Martin Mendelsberg for his assistance, and to RMCAD student Michael Arestad for his awesome design work!