Exhibits to Engage Students and the Community

The SU Libraries are fortunate to have outstanding exhibit spaces. Exhibits are a means of engaging our students and community, and we encourage student participation. The exhibit spaces are meant as “Exhibit Labs” where students, faculty and staff can share their scholarship and interests by creating exhibits with assistance from our exhibits and artifacts curator, Janie Kreines. In the past two years, several of our exhibits, in fact, have been the products of student research, including last fall’s You’re on Indian Land ...  exhibit, which shared research done by an Honors class and a history class.

We are proud to sponsor two major exhibits this fall: Traveling through Special Collections: Vignettes of Voyages and Travel and Over Here and Over There: The World at War, 1914-1918. Traveling through Special Collections.

Curated primarily by Ian Post and Janie Kreines of the Nabb Center with graphic design by Lori Pauling of the Publications Office, Traveling through Special Collections features travel-related materials from special collections at the Nabb Center, such as diaries, letters, postcards, photographs, scrapbooks and drawings. Exhibit visitors can trek across several continents on canals, railroads and highways, and they can cross the oceans with our intrepid travelers from the late 1700s to the late 1900s.

Over Here and Over There looks at World War I in honor of the centennial of the war’s end coming up this November. Curated by Stephen Gehnrich, an SU professor who teaches biology but also World War I history, as well as Creston Long, Janie Kreines and Bea Hardy of the SU Libraries with graphic design by Lori Pauling, the exhibit explores both worldwide aspects of the war and Delmarva’s participation. Using artifacts, documents, posters and other images, the exhibit highlights soldiers’ experiences, humanitarian efforts, the use of propaganda, and the participation of women and African Americans in the war effort, among other topics.

 

Our students learn from producing and installing exhibits and from the exhibits themselves. Jaclyn Laman, student curatorial assistant, helps with the research, pulling of objects to put on display, and installation and de-installation of exhibits. Within days of the Traveling exhibit opening, one faculty member contacted us to let us know that students in one of her education classes would be using the exhibit as the basis for an assignment. Other faculty and students will, we hope, see the exhibits and be excited at the types of materials we have and see ways to use them for class assignments or even honors or master’s theses.

Traveling through Special Collections is in the first-floor lobby of the Guerrieri Academic Commons and is open whenever the building is open. Over Here and Over There is in the Thompson Gallery on the fourth floor of the Guerrieri Academic Commons. It is open Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Both exhibits are free and open to the public. They will be available through December 19.

See the events listing in this newsletter for related events.