Over here at Fleet Library, we're celebrating Founders Day with a special edition of See Also that helps you find more information about RISD's founding decades and introduces you to two "founding" women, in addition to Helen Metcalf and Eliza Radeke, without whom we might also not be quite the RISD we are today: Eliza Buffington, our first official librarian, who put the cards in our card catalog, and Judith Eleanor Motley Low, who, in founding the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in 1901, also laid the groundwork for RISD's Landscape Architecture program.
See also our new resource guide for Women's (Art) History and, keeping in the spirit of the month, the announcement for Feminized, the first new student-curated exhibition to be installed in Gelman Gallery since the start of the pandemic closure just over a year ago. Let's take this as a milestone of significance and a sign of hope, much like the crocuses that are appearing all over College Hill, that we will all be celebrating together again soon in campus galleries, classrooms, studios, and stacks.
I look forward to seeing you back at Fleet,
Margot McIlwain Nishimura
Dean of Libraries
P.S. Speaking of women founders, please consider joining the RISD Alumni founders panel conversation in honor of Women's History Month this evening at 6 pm. It features designer founders carrying on the entrepreneurial spirit of Helen Metcalf. Hosted by Rene Payne 83 GD, founder of FAVOR, the panel will include Sara Durham 92 IL, founder of Big Duck and Advomatic; Annie Evelyn 99 FD/MFA 07, co-founder and deputy director of Crafting the Future; and Keita Turner 91 AP, founder of Keita Turner Design and Livvy & Neva. Register here.
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FOUNDING WOMEN: IN THE LIBRARY, TOO
Look inside Infinite Radius, co-edited by Archivist Andrew Martinez and former Dean of Architecture + Design Dawn Barrett, to learn more about the fascinating histories of RISD's founding women, including Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, the "inventor and sustainer" of RISD and her daughter Eliza G. Radeke, who served as president from 1913-1931. If your curiosity is piqued, you might also want to see what we have in the Archives for each of these women, here and here.
In Infinite Radius, you can also read about Eliza Buffington, the first professionally trained librarian of the RISD Library, who served in this capacity from 1909 through 1911. In just two short years, Buffington is credited with introducing the typewriter, catalog cards from the Library of Congress, a formal budget and building valuable collections. As author, and former library director, Carol Terry writes, "[Eliza] set the groundwork with a core mission of the library that has remained: to provide visual materials for study and inspiration, to serve the research and information needs of the library users with collections and services geared to those needs, and to provide a place that is the intellectual center of the institution."
Recognize the former RISD library (until 1937), pictured below? It's what's now the Edna W. Lawrence Natural History Collection space of the Nature Lab!
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FOUNDING WOMAN OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
In time for Founders Day, we have just launched a new research guide for the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture collections in the RISD Archives and Special Collections. Like RISD, Lowthorpe was also founded by a prescient woman, Judith Eleanor Motley Low, in 1901. At the time, it was called the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, Gardening, and Horticulture for Women. In 1945, Lowthorpe was absorbed by RISD and would become the foundation for our department of Landscape Architecture.
The Lowthorpe School Collection holds surviving primary resources -- including real estate records, course catalogues, other teaching materials, and library accession books. In addition to archival material, the bulk of our Special Collections botanical/ gardening/ landscape architecture books (including soil science, engineering and insects) also come from the Lowthorpe collection. One of the popular gems is "Li giardini di Roma" (gardens of Rome), a large folio collection of landscaping maps from the seventeenth century. We recently acquired the drawings of Evelyn N. Poehler, Lowthorpe, '32, who designed the gardens of the Wethersfield Farm, in Amenia, NY.
Plus, we have many beautiful, hand-colored glass lantern slides like the one pictured below that came from the Lowthorpe School and are the focus of a current Fleet Library digitization project.
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WOMEN'S ART HISTORY
We're continuing our Women's History Month celebration with the launch of "Women's (Art) History", a resource guide and jumping off point to explore women's history in the arts through streaming platforms (including newest addition Electronic Arts Intermix), books, zines, events in the library and at RISD, but also through institutions like the Smithsonian and the U.S. National Archives. Use this form to offer any suggestions for additions to the guide, so that we can grow it as a community!
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FEMINIZED
Feminized, an exhibition curated by Mariana Ramos Ortiz MFA 21 PR and Breslin Bell MFA 21 PR, focuses on heterogeneous identities addressing gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, citizenship, age and disability by way of politically compromised making. Up through April 3 in the Gelman Student Exhibitions Gallery, Chace Center, 2nd floor, 20 North Main Street, and visible from now until well into the future on the Campus Exhibitions Flickr site.
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