{"id":4846,"date":"2025-02-03T14:24:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T19:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/?p=4846"},"modified":"2025-07-24T15:27:56","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T19:27:56","slug":"investigating-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/investigating-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Investigating the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digging into the Art & Artifact Collection<\/span><\/h2>\n

A<\/span>t 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\u2019s Art and Artifact Collection\u2014priceless art, ancient artifacts, and unknown objects waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\n

Professors Tina Sheller \u201974 <\/strong><\/span>and April Oettinger have been doing just that\u2014discovering 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. \u201cThis was a huge advancement,\u201d said Sheller.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cTina has a knack for discovering collections,\u201d 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\u2019s conservation.<\/p>\n

The Art and Artifact Collection includes a number of donations by alumnae like Lulie Poole Hooper 1896<\/strong><\/span>, Myra McDade 1901<\/strong><\/span>, and Margaret Kent Bell 1924<\/strong><\/span>. 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.<\/p>\n

Preserving the historic trades<\/span><\/h2>\n

Melanie Lytle, M.A.H.P. \u201911<\/strong><\/span>, 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. \u201cI adore the students, teaching, advising, mentoring faculty, developing curriculum,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s the most satisfying work I\u2019ve done in preservation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lytle also has a side business, called Glaze Craft Windows, restoring historic windows. \u201cI decided to explore another aspect of preservation,\u201d she said, \u201cwhich is the historic trades, or the heritage trades\u2014the hands-on part of preservation.\u201d Lytle asked the restorer Pam Howland to teach her window restoration. \u201cI spend a couple of weeks with her on a few different trips, learning the basics,\u201d she said. \u201cThen I learned everything else through a series of books, YouTube, and from my peers in the window preservation community.\u201d Lytle believes it\u2019s vital to encourage women and people who are underrepresented in the trades to take up the work.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Some might think that\u2019s a lot of work for some drafty old windows, but that\u2019s a misconception. \u201cWe can bring them up to our current standards to be quite efficient,\u201d Lytle said. \u201cAnd they can last forever if they get the right care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lytle has several ongoing projects: She\u2019s working on windows from an 1898 building in Silver Spring, MD, as well as one from 1936 in Falls Church, VA. \u201cIt\u2019s an exciting time,\u201d she said, \u201cto think about the trades and increasing the diversity of heritage craftspeople.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recording oral histories<\/span><\/h2>\n

One of Lytle\u2019s students, Bennett King, M.A.H.P. \u201925<\/strong><\/span>, preserves history from a different angle. He works in Arlington, VA, recording oral histories from legacy businesses along Langston Boulevard, including Hall\u2019s Hill, a historically Black community founded by formerly enslaved people.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s low-residency M.A.H.P. program, which would allow him to stay on the West Coast.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cLangston Boulevard is a long stretch,\u201d he said, with 18 communities along it. \u201cWe started collecting oral histories of the legacy businesses,\u201d which must be at least 25 years old and contribute to the community in some way.<\/p>\n

King and his colleagues ask about the history of the business as well as the people working there. They\u2019ve 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 \u201che\u201d on the wall of her business.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stories are fascinating to hear,\u201d King said. \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d The owner told King that he used to throw rocks at the door of the American Nazi Party.<\/p>\n

The project is ongoing and popular with the community; King makes regular trips out to Virginia to work on it. He\u2019d love to see historic business preservation become even more common, as these businesses bring real value to their communities. \u201cIf you look especially at immigrant and BIPOC communities, these are the economics of a local area,\u201d he said. \u201cThey fund themselves, they hire locals, their trade is mostly local or within the culture or community.\u201d King thinks of these legacies as a timeline through the culture. \u201cI call it \u2018cultural echoes.\u2019 These businesses are a place where people go and create memories and share stories. To me, that\u2019s one of the biggest values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Displaying the art and artifacts<\/span><\/h2>\n

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. \u201cWe\u2019ve come full circle with using the collection in the classroom the way that it was used more than 100 years ago,\u201d said Oettinger. They\u2019re also mounting exhibitions in the Athenaeum with the art and artifacts, which the students love working on.<\/p>\n

One show last fall was an exhibition called Hey, What\u2019s That: Mysteries in the Collection<\/em>. Curated by Madelyn Brown \u201926 <\/strong><\/span>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\u2019t know much about. \u201cWe wanted to do something similar to show students the interesting objects in the collection, since we didn\u2019t think a lot of students, outside VMC and art, knew about Goucher\u2019s collection,\u201d said Brown.<\/p>\n

The group made a list of pieces to display. \u201cWe then took the time to walk through the collection shelves and note down what caught our eye,\u201d Brown said. \u201cWe wanted to pick pieces that would stand out in the hallway, attract people\u2019s attention, and show the wide variety of objects in Goucher\u2019s possession.\u201d They chose Japanese miniature sculptures called netsuke, along with other small ivory figures, a painted Chinese scroll, and amulets. \u201cWe chose ones we thought had interesting imagery, themes, or beautiful artistic techniques.\u201d The students made posters to explain what was known about the objects and offered questions to stimulate viewers\u2019 curiosity, then left sticky notes and pencils out for visitors to offer insights or suggestions into the pieces\u2019 provenance.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve received a few leads, most notably the name of an Egyptian figure with the head of a lion, holding an instrument called a sistrum. \u201cIt could either be Bastet or Sekhmet, but more likely the former because the sistrum is more associated with Bastet,\u201d said Brown.<\/p>\n

Applying queer theory<\/span><\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cQueer 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,\u201d said Smith. \u201cAs hard as it is, queer theory is still a necessary framework for students to grapple with, if we\u2019re 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.\u201d To do this, Smith has students using archives in a few ways.<\/p>\n

One way is to have the students contribute to the archives. \u201cThe idea is that by looking for cultural artifacts that surround them,\u201d he said, \u201cthey can take some of the heady, abstract ideas we\u2019re discussing in our readings and apply them to how they understand norms and boundaries around gender and sexuality in their life.\u201d Smith\u2019s students added contemporary artifacts to Goucher\u2019s archive to capture how gender and sexuality were expressed and viewed at the college in 2024.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> performance. The students were also inspired by an \u201cIns and Outs\u201d column they discovered in old issues of the Baltimore Gay Life<\/em> newspaper, a jokey list detailing trends for the LGBTQ community in the city. Some of the \u201cins,\u201d according to students: being super fruity and loud, Lacanian philosophy, and salt and vinegar chips. Some of the \u201couts\u201d: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders<\/em>, mold, and using your inside voice.<\/p>\n

One lesson that Smith\u2019s students learn is that people from the past were no different from them. \u201cThere is this myth that the proliferation of gender and sexual identities is a recent phenomenon,\u201d he said, \u201cso we start the class by looking at William Dorsey Swann.\u201d Swann was born into slavery in Maryland in 1860 and was America\u2019s first known drag queen. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researching state legislation<\/span><\/h2>\n

Jenn da Rosa is the director of Goucher\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are gaps in education that put students at an academic disadvantage,\u201d said da Rosa. \u201cIt puts us all at a major disadvantage if most of the members of our society don\u2019t know these environmental issues are a problem.\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cI 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She did find parallels, but what was most interesting to her was the evolution of political tactics. \u201cOne of the most popular tactics for evolution and climate change over the last 20 years is the \u2018academic freedom bill,\u2019\u201d said da Rosa, \u201cwhere state legislatures put forth this idea that science teachers should be able to introduce any idea into a science classroom, whether or not it\u2019s scientific, under the guise of academic freedom.\u201d The bills would allow religion to be taught in science classes, but when they didn\u2019t work, the tactics changed to what da Rosa calls \u201canti-indoctrination legislation.\u201d These proposed bills ban teachers from covering controversial subjects that are considered too political. \u201cThat\u2019s very vague and subjective,\u201d she said. \u201cYou could name anything as being too controversial, too political, and ban it from the classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

She realized there will always be different groups vying to control what\u2019s taught in a science classroom. \u201cWhether the motivation is political or religious, we need to be aware that these types of techniques are being used,\u201d said da Rosa, \u201cso we can educate the public and advocate for teachers who try to teach good science but are not allowed to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unraveling mysteries of the art and artifacts<\/span><\/h2>\n

Late last fall, Sheller was showing the Hey, What\u2019s That<\/em> student exhibition to a few people when Jamie Nguyen \u201925<\/strong><\/span>, a visual and material culture major, walked up. Nguyen, who had missed the opening of the exhibition, examined a figurine. \u201cOh, my god,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cI might have a clue on this deity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a similar motif in the Vietnamese National Museum of Fine Arts,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n

Next, Sheller and Nguyen looked at a Chinese scroll. \u201cIt\u2019s much like a Renaissance painting,\u201d said Nguyen. \u201cThey used scrolls to communicate stories, with many different variations across regions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. Nguyen dove into the history and ethical underpinnings of the collection, particularly the Florence Eddowes Morris 1911<\/strong><\/span> textile collection. \u201cI 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,\u201d said Nguyen. \u201cIt adds a level of complexity to the artifacts in that collection, because that means a lot of the objects \u2018escaped\u2019 the Forbidden City during that time.\u201d Nguyen stressed that it\u2019s only a hypothesis, and more research, as always, still needs to be done.<\/p>\n

More research also needs to be done on the Buddha statue on the first floor of the Athenaeum, which Nguyen suspects is not authentic. \u201cThe only information we know is that it\u2019s Burmese, and allegedly given to John Goucher in 1895,\u201d 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. \u201cThat\u2019s usually a sign of fraud,\u201d said Nguyen. \u201cBut Burmese art in the western world is so scarcely documented.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the kind of detective work that excites Sheller\u2019s and Oettinger\u2019s students. \u201cThey love studying something concrete,\u201d said Sheller. \u201cHaving 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\u2019s a wonderful tool for teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":4832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[87510],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87484],"class_list":["post-4846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"yoast_head":"\nInvestigating the Past | Goucher Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Goucher professors and students are immersed in research, seeking to preserve the past and find insights into the present.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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