Investigating the past

Goucher professors and students are immersed in research. Diving deep into archival collections, historic trades, legacy businesses, and more, they seek to preserve the past and find insights into the present.
By Molly Englund
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Digging into the Art & Artifact Collection
At the heart of campus, on the bottom floor of the Athenaeum, past the elevators and next to the vending machines, is a locked set of doors. Behind them, stored on museum-quality shelving in a climate-controlled room, is Goucher’s Art and Artifact Collection—priceless art, ancient artifacts, and unknown objects waiting to be discovered.
Professors Tina Sheller ’74 and April Oettinger have been doing just that—discovering the unknown. Sheller, a retired assistant professor of visual and material culture, is the keeper of the Artifact Collection, which is made up of many donated collections. When its first curator, Arthur Bibbins, left the college in 1914, the collection languished. When the Athenaeum was built in 2009, Allyn Massey, an associate professor of studio art, urged the college to dedicate space in the building for the collection. “This was a huge advancement,” said Sheller.
A few years ago, Sheller and Oettinger began working with students to identify pieces in the collections and curate exhibitions with the objects they found. “Tina has a knack for discovering collections,” said Oettinger, an art history professor who started the Visual and Material Culture Program at Goucher and has secured two federal grants for the collection’s conservation.
The Art and Artifact Collection includes a number of donations by alumnae like Lulie Poole Hooper 1896, Myra McDade 1901, and Margaret Kent Bell 1924. The collections are wide-ranging: Asian ceramics, ivories, and painted scrolls; Egyptian amulets, beads, and masks; ancient Roman coins and Revolutionary-era currency; 19th-century French posters; prints from Matisse and Picasso; Alexander Calder tapestries; hand-carved African masks; and watercolors of 19th-century Native American life by Baltimore artist Frank B. Mayer. William Guth, the fourth president of Goucher, purchased a large set of ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets in 1920, but today only four remain at the college; students discovered that the rest were permanently loaned to Yale University, where they are catalogued as the Goucher Collection.
Preserving the historic trades
Melanie Lytle, M.A.H.P. ’11, researches the past in order to preserve it. Lytle became the academic director of the M.A. in Historic Preservation Program at Goucher in 2019. “I adore the students, teaching, advising, mentoring faculty, developing curriculum,” she said. “It’s the most satisfying work I’ve done in preservation.”
Lytle also has a side business, called Glaze Craft Windows, restoring historic windows. “I decided to explore another aspect of preservation,” she said, “which is the historic trades, or the heritage trades—the hands-on part of preservation.” Lytle asked the restorer Pam Howland to teach her window restoration. “I spend a couple of weeks with her on a few different trips, learning the basics,” she said. “Then I learned everything else through a series of books, YouTube, and from my peers in the window preservation community.” Lytle believes it’s vital to encourage women and people who are underrepresented in the trades to take up the work.
To hone her skills, Lytle volunteered at Clarks Summit University for a year, restoring more than 35 windows on campus with a crew of CSU students she led through a 15-week full-time, paid apprenticeship. Lytle uses traditional materials and methods, like linseed-oil paints and putties and Dutchman repairs for wood rot. There are about 40 steps to restore a window, which begin with Lytle taking the sash out of their frames and bringing it to her workshop, where she removes the glass. If needed, she’ll remove the old putty and paint, get down to bare wood, then put it all together again, salvaging as much of the wood and glass as possible, and reinstalling it in the building. This process can take a few months.
Some might think that’s a lot of work for some drafty old windows, but that’s a misconception. “We can bring them up to our current standards to be quite efficient,” Lytle said. “And they can last forever if they get the right care.”
Lytle has several ongoing projects: She’s working on windows from an 1898 building in Silver Spring, MD, as well as one from 1936 in Falls Church, VA. “It’s an exciting time,” she said, “to think about the trades and increasing the diversity of heritage craftspeople.”
Recording oral histories
One of Lytle’s students, Bennett King, M.A.H.P. ’25, preserves history from a different angle. He works in Arlington, VA, recording oral histories from legacy businesses along Langston Boulevard, including Hall’s Hill, a historically Black community founded by formerly enslaved people.
King lives in San Diego, where he ran his own boutique software design studio. Just before COVID, King heard that La Bodega, a well-known art gallery showcasing Mexican American art, was closing due to gentrification. He became fascinated with preserving cultural heritage and discovered Goucher’s low-residency M.A.H.P. program, which would allow him to stay on the West Coast.
Although he was long out of college, King thrived in the program, and Lytle recommended him for a grant-funded project that became the People and Places Project, run by the Langston Boulevard Alliance. “Langston Boulevard is a long stretch,” he said, with 18 communities along it. “We started collecting oral histories of the legacy businesses,” which must be at least 25 years old and contribute to the community in some way.
King and his colleagues ask about the history of the business as well as the people working there. They’ve spoken to first-generation Filipino immigrants, an Afghan immigrant from the Soviet-Afghan War, and one of the first female opticians in Virginia, who proudly displayed her license referring to her as “he” on the wall of her business.
“The stories are fascinating to hear,” King said. “There’s an electronics business called Glebe Radio and Appliance. The guy running it has been there since 1960. His brother opened it in 1946, and that business went through desegregation in Virginia.” The owner told King that he used to throw rocks at the door of the American Nazi Party.
The project is ongoing and popular with the community; King makes regular trips out to Virginia to work on it. He’d love to see historic business preservation become even more common, as these businesses bring real value to their communities. “If you look especially at immigrant and BIPOC communities, these are the economics of a local area,” he said. “They fund themselves, they hire locals, their trade is mostly local or within the culture or community.” King thinks of these legacies as a timeline through the culture. “I call it ‘cultural echoes.’ These businesses are a place where people go and create memories and share stories. To me, that’s one of the biggest values.”
Displaying the art and artifacts
When Sheller and Oettinger decided to make the Art and Artifact Collection a centerpiece of the Visual and Material Culture (VMC) Program, they committed themselves to the 19th-century pedagogy of object-based teaching. “We’ve come full circle with using the collection in the classroom the way that it was used more than 100 years ago,” said Oettinger. They’re also mounting exhibitions in the Athenaeum with the art and artifacts, which the students love working on.
One show last fall was an exhibition called Hey, What’s That: Mysteries in the Collection. Curated by Madelyn Brown ’26 and another student, as well as Sheller, it was inspired by a Walters Art Museum show that displayed items from their collection that the museum didn’t know much about. “We wanted to do something similar to show students the interesting objects in the collection, since we didn’t think a lot of students, outside VMC and art, knew about Goucher’s collection,” said Brown.
The group made a list of pieces to display. “We then took the time to walk through the collection shelves and note down what caught our eye,” Brown said. “We wanted to pick pieces that would stand out in the hallway, attract people’s attention, and show the wide variety of objects in Goucher’s possession.” They chose Japanese miniature sculptures called netsuke, along with other small ivory figures, a painted Chinese scroll, and amulets. “We chose ones we thought had interesting imagery, themes, or beautiful artistic techniques.” The students made posters to explain what was known about the objects and offered questions to stimulate viewers’ curiosity, then left sticky notes and pencils out for visitors to offer insights or suggestions into the pieces’ provenance.
They’ve received a few leads, most notably the name of an Egyptian figure with the head of a lion, holding an instrument called a sistrum. “It could either be Bastet or Sekhmet, but more likely the former because the sistrum is more associated with Bastet,” said Brown.
Applying queer theory
Assistant Professor of Writing Walker Smith also uses archival research in his classes. Last spring, his Rhetorics of Gender and Sexuality class took a field trip to the UMBC Kuhn Library, which has extensive LGBTQ+ resources in its digital archives.
“Queer theory is a difficult genre of academic writing to navigate for people both inside and outside the academy, despite big figures like Judith Butler and others who have entered our cultural zeitgeist,” said Smith. “As hard as it is, queer theory is still a necessary framework for students to grapple with, if we’re going to trace the historical development of the gay and lesbian movement and its rhetoric, and its later development into a very radical and critical political framework.” To do this, Smith has students using archives in a few ways.
One way is to have the students contribute to the archives. “The idea is that by looking for cultural artifacts that surround them,” he said, “they can take some of the heady, abstract ideas we’re discussing in our readings and apply them to how they understand norms and boundaries around gender and sexuality in their life.” Smith’s students added contemporary artifacts to Goucher’s archive to capture how gender and sexuality were expressed and viewed at the college in 2024.
The students chose a slew of different objects. Some were institutional, like a copy of an Instagram post about affinity spaces on campus; some were more about student life, like campus flyers for the annual Rocky Horror Picture Show performance. The students were also inspired by an “Ins and Outs” column they discovered in old issues of the Baltimore Gay Life newspaper, a jokey list detailing trends for the LGBTQ community in the city. Some of the “ins,” according to students: being super fruity and loud, Lacanian philosophy, and salt and vinegar chips. Some of the “outs”: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, mold, and using your inside voice.
One lesson that Smith’s students learn is that people from the past were no different from them. “There is this myth that the proliferation of gender and sexual identities is a recent phenomenon,” he said, “so we start the class by looking at William Dorsey Swann.” Swann was born into slavery in Maryland in 1860 and was America’s first known drag queen. “We start there, and there is a shock in the room. These are two things, the history of slavery in the United States and the history of drag in the United States, that have not converged for them before. Realizing a person could be both shatters that myth right from the very beginning.”
Researching state legislation
Jenn da Rosa is the director of Goucher’s M.A. in Environmental Sustainability and Management Program. Growing up as an Air Force kid, she moved around a lot. She loved science, but in college, she realized there were two subjects she had never been taught in public school: the theory of evolution and climate change.
“There are gaps in education that put students at an academic disadvantage,” said da Rosa. “It puts us all at a major disadvantage if most of the members of our society don’t know these environmental issues are a problem.” Da Rosa has been thinking about this issue for years, but she sensed that gaps had only gotten worse since COVID. She began a systematic look at all the state bills and legislation from the last two decades that tried to block the teaching of science that’s considered controversial. To do so, she went to each state legislature website and reviewed the archives of all the bills that had been proposed at the state level. “I really homed in on the last 20 years to find out if there were any parallels to the barriers being used to block the teaching of evolution in the science classroom and barriers being used to block the teaching of climate change in the science classroom,” she said.
She did find parallels, but what was most interesting to her was the evolution of political tactics. “One of the most popular tactics for evolution and climate change over the last 20 years is the ‘academic freedom bill,’” said da Rosa, “where state legislatures put forth this idea that science teachers should be able to introduce any idea into a science classroom, whether or not it’s scientific, under the guise of academic freedom.” The bills would allow religion to be taught in science classes, but when they didn’t work, the tactics changed to what da Rosa calls “anti-indoctrination legislation.” These proposed bills ban teachers from covering controversial subjects that are considered too political. “That’s very vague and subjective,” she said. “You could name anything as being too controversial, too political, and ban it from the classroom.”
She realized there will always be different groups vying to control what’s taught in a science classroom. “Whether the motivation is political or religious, we need to be aware that these types of techniques are being used,” said da Rosa, “so we can educate the public and advocate for teachers who try to teach good science but are not allowed to.”
Unraveling mysteries of the art and artifacts
Late last fall, Sheller was showing the Hey, What’s That student exhibition to a few people when Jamie Nguyen ’25, a visual and material culture major, walked up. Nguyen, who had missed the opening of the exhibition, examined a figurine. “Oh, my god,” Nguyen said. “I might have a clue on this deity.”
Nguyen, who is from Vietnam, pointed to the multi-arm deity and explained that it could be a bodhisattva, created in a northern Buddhist style. “I’ve seen a similar motif in the Vietnamese National Museum of Fine Arts,” Nguyen said.
Next, Sheller and Nguyen looked at a Chinese scroll. “It’s much like a Renaissance painting,” said Nguyen. “They used scrolls to communicate stories, with many different variations across regions.”
Last year, Nguyen worked on a different exhibition that was displayed in the Athenaeum, Goucher Collectors and Their Collections: Objects of Beauty and Wonder From Across Asia. Nguyen dove into the history and ethical underpinnings of the collection, particularly the Florence Eddowes Morris 1911 textile collection. “I noticed that many of them came from Beijing in the year 1925, and it clicked that that was the year the Forbidden City turned into a museum, because the emperor, Puyi, was banished,” said Nguyen. “It adds a level of complexity to the artifacts in that collection, because that means a lot of the objects ‘escaped’ the Forbidden City during that time.” Nguyen stressed that it’s only a hypothesis, and more research, as always, still needs to be done.
More research also needs to be done on the Buddha statue on the first floor of the Athenaeum, which Nguyen suspects is not authentic. “The only information we know is that it’s Burmese, and allegedly given to John Goucher in 1895,” Nguyen said. But a telling sign is the different levels of craftsmanship on the statue, with engravings on the front and nothing on the back. “That’s usually a sign of fraud,” said Nguyen. “But Burmese art in the western world is so scarcely documented.”
This is the kind of detective work that excites Sheller’s and Oettinger’s students. “They love studying something concrete,” said Sheller. “Having to answer questions about the object leads them to other questions, which invests them in that process of doing not only history but also cultural analysis. It’s a wonderful tool for teaching.”
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