Yvonne Elet

Art Library Exhibit Case Showing Matthew Vassar's Shovel, Photo T. Hill, May 18, 2022

 

Edith Roberts' native plantings  along the Fonteyn Kill, Vassar College, Photo T. Hill, May 6, 2017

May 18, 2022.

Vassar Professor of Art Yvonne Elet discusses the exhibition she curated with Vassar art major and Ford Scholar Caleb Mitchell entitled The Campus Green: The Olmsted Firm's Designs for Vassar College, celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, on view in the Vassar College Art Library, April 11 - June 6.

There have long been unsubstantiated reports that Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the father of American landscape architecture, designed Vassar’s bucolic campus, although the source of Vassar’s early designs remains unclear. Drawing on new archival research, this exhibition presents the contributions by three generations of the Olmsted firm to the Vassar campus. Together with a brochure and an article in press, this exhibition marks the bicentennial of F. L. Olmsted’s birth on April 26, 2022. It is also the inaugural exhibition in a series about the history, preservation, and planning of the Vassar campus, organized by the Vassar Art Department. 

Vassar Campus History website: A digital repository for research  on the history of the architecture, landscape, and soundscape of the Vassar College campus
 

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Miriam Cohen and Mark G. Seidl

November 4, 2020.

Miriam Cohen, Professor of History on the Evalyn Clark Chair at Vassar College, and Vassar Special Collections Librarian and Cataloger Mark G. Seidl will discuss the exhibition entitled Votes for Women: Vassar and the Politics of Women's Suffrage, sponsored by the Vassar College Libraries to celebrate the centenary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States.

Video of Robyn Muncy Lecture, Nov. 12 at 5:30 p.m.

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Yvonne Elet

October 16, 2019.

Yvonne Elet, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Vassar College, discusses her article, co-authored with Virginia Duncan for Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (39:2, 2019) entitled: "Beatrix Farrand and campus landscape at Vassar: pedagogy and practice, 1925-29."  Farrand, one of the great landscape architects of the 20th century and a path-breaking woman in the field, came to Vassar as Consulting Landscape Gardener in 1925. She is well known for her institutional designs (unusual for a woman at the time), notably at Princeton and Yale; Vassar was her one opportunity to work at a womens’ college. Farrand came to campus at a significant moment when the Chair of Botany and pioneering ecologist Edith Roberts was fostering progressive programs in native plant ecology and landscape architecture – efforts that reformed young women’s training and career prospects, and made Vassar an early center for women and landscape. Yvonne Elet discusses the challenges these women faced, and traces Farrand’s design projects, from the forecourt of Main Building to the so-called Euthenics quad around Blodgett Hall. Most significantly, Farrand established an arboretum, conceiving it to comprise the entire campus: she mixed formal and informal design elements, and native and foreign species, to create a beautiful setting that would serve the instructional needs of students and faculty –a notion that has come to be central to Vassar’s identity.

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Thomas Edward Hill

Tina Barney (American, (b.1945) The Librarian, 2010, Chromogenic color print © Tina Barney Courtesy of the artist and Janet Borden, Inc.

October 10, 2018.

In this installment of our series on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary society, Milly Budny (VC'71), Founding Director of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, turns the table to interview Library Cafe host and Vassar College Art Librarian Thomas Hill about the Library Cafe, his career as a librarian at Yale University and Vassar College, and his background and views on subjects that include the connection between education and friendship, and how library education and practice might be better integrated into academic research and culture.

Part 1:
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Katherine Mangiardi (b. 1982). Kerchief, 2018. Acrylic on board, 12.7 x 12.7 cm.

October 17, 2018.

Part 2:     
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James Mundy

 Irving Ramsey Wiles, American, 1861-1948, Girl Writing, oil on canvas.. Gift of Ruth Scherm, VC class of 1945 

March 2, 2016. 

James Mundy (VC'74), Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, talks about the Exhibit "American Stories 1800-1950" on view at the Center January 29 - April 17, 2016.

"The founding strength of the art museum at Vassar College in 1864 was its American paintings. That collection has grown greatly over the years with the result that a number of the works by major American painters are seldom seen. This exhibition will explore some of the American riches found in storage and will feature key works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries housed in the Art Center's vault. Among the artists featured are John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, Sanford Gifford, George Inness, William Merritt Chase, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Ben Shahn." 

39:23 minutes.

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Nicholas Adams

February 5, 2014.

Architectural historian and Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art Nicholas Adams talks about the exhibition now on view in the Vassar College Library, Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Center entitled: The Architect's Library: Notable Books on Architectural Themes in the Vassar College Library.

"The book as the site of canonicity and debate from Vignola to Robert Venturi was the overarching theme of the exhibition,  one of whose contributions was to remind us that the design of the book itself participated powerfully in projecting the artistic attitudes that shaped its content. . . . This exhibition showed that the study of what libraries own in the field of architecture, how titles were acquired or received through donation, and the significance of a collection for an institution’s identity and development are worthy educational topics."  -- Joseph M. Siry,  JSAH

41:43 minutes.

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