A bird’s-eye lithographic view of Syracuse, N.Y., (engraved by Lewis Bradley, lithographed by D. W. Moody, and published by Smith Brothers of New York).
Syracuse University Libraries’ spring exhibition, “You Are Here: Expanding the Concept of Place,” opens with a reception on April 20 from 4:30-6 p.m. in the gallery on the sixth floor of Bird Library.
Through a selection of rare books, pamphlets, maps, manuscripts, photographs and other artifacts from Special Collections, this exhibition re-frames common notions and accepted definitions of what “place” can be by connecting specifically to the Syracuse community: as in the geographical relevance of the Erie Canal, the conceptual destination of the Underground Railroad or the student experience specific to Syracuse University.
The exhibition and reception is presented in collaboration with and partially sponsored by the Syracuse University Humanities Center as a part of the 2016 Syracuse Symposium on Place. It will remain on view through mid-August.
Also on view at the Goldstein Faculty Center, the Crouse Hinds Administrative building, and the Joseph I. Lubin House in New York City, is “The Lost Spaces of Syracuse University,” an exhibition exploring the evolution of Syracuse University’s many buildings and spaces over our 147-year history.
From the University’s early years in an office building in downtown Syracuse, to the campus boom of the post-World War II era, and the current development of the Campus Framework, each of these periods of change has added to the list of the University’s “lost buildings.” This exhibition of materials and photographs from the University Archives showcases the legacy of some of these lost spaces.
In conjunction with the Libraries’ exhibition opening, Brice Nordquist (Writing Program) and Emily Stokes-Rees (museum studies) will present the results of their Delmas-funded Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) Faculty Fellows projects. In its inaugural year, the program provides stipends to selected faculty who incorporate the use of special collections in their classes and enable their students to handle, analyze, and interpret SCRC’s rich primary source materials.
Students in Nordquist’s Rhetorics of Futurity: Utopia, Sci-Fi and City Planning course engaged with materials from SU’s collections of utopian, science fiction, and city planning materials. Students in Stokes-Rees’s Ethnographic Curatorship course had a hands-on curatorial experience with plastics collections and developed a new installation for the Plastics Pioneers Reading Room, located on the sixth floor of Bird Library.
