Tag Archives: Sullivant Hall

Sullivant Hall Hard Hat Tour

We came, we saw, we imagined walls where none have been built yet, hiked dusty staircases to our three heavenly cartoon museum galleries, stood stupefied and tried to envision where we would hang the limited edition full-color lithograph of Nancy dreaming about eating an ice cream cone.

The exterior of our new home, Sullivant Hall, facing N. High Street.

Curator Jenny Robb and architect Pete Confar look over the blueprints for the 2nd floor of the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum project.

Yes, our most recent hard hat tour of the Sullivant Hall building project was overwhelmingly exciting. Currently, demolition has been completed in the space, and construction begins soon.

Wandering across the North High Street pavilion from our current 6,000 sq-ft facility to the new just-under 30,000 sq-ft facility for the Cartoon Library felt like every metaphor from a college graduation to opening up a birthday gift or running into the living room on Christmas morning. The plans have been over 7 years in the making, and we’re finally just a year away, with something real to behold.

It is particularly thrilling to imagine what this must feel like for the invincible Lucy Caswell, our founding curator, to see this all start coming to fruition.

Founding Curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, in her hard hat lovingly decorated by cartoonist Jeff Smith.

 

 

 

Lucy, who started it all and has been here since Milton Caniff showed up with his collection in the 1970s, will finally see this long-deserved home for the Cartoon Library fully realized. After so many decades of dedicated hard work at preserving and promoting the comics form, the payoff is sure to feel beyond gratifying.

One of multiple collection storage areas.

 

 

 

 

The expansion of the Cartoon Library into Sullivant Hall offers us boundless potential. Not only will the space have three museum-quality exhibit galleries (complete with security guards, gorgeous custom made cases, and sleek benches), but every other aspect of what we do here will be enhanced.

The immensely expanded storage areas will allow us to consolidate an entire offsite facility we have been using for years. We will have a large seminar room dedicated to Will Eisner for programming as well as a conference room, giving us the potential for all new community outreach opportunities, event hosting, classes and more. We’ll have massive processing facilities for tackling the collection and comfortably accommodating more workers and volunteers. Extensive reading room space, with all new ergonomic furniture to make for the most agreeable researching experience possible. Exhibit preparation, framing, and encapsulation facilities. A gorgeous lobby (architect rendering below) with Billy Ireland’s drawing table prominently displayed in a glass case as you walk in.

Architectural rendering of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s north lobby.

Furthermore, we will have two large exquisitely hand-made stained-glass windows of Billy Ireland’s cartoons from The Passing Show, one of which will be back-lit and displayed at the entrance on North High Street, and the other of which will separate the reading room from the north entrance lobby.

This is indeed an exciting time for all of us here at the Cartoon Library, and we hope that all of you out there reading this can share in our glee, let alone join us for our opening festivities next fall! The three galleries in our new building will rotate three times per year, and we have some extremely riveting exhibits in the works. The opening show will be guest curated by the great Brian Walker, whose father’s International Museum of Cartoon Art collection resides here at OSU. Brian came in from Connecticut and spent the past week with us at the Cartoon Library choosing items for the show, and take it from us- it’s going to be something else.

Thank you to all who have supported us in this massive endeavor, we truly cannot wait to be able to give back with bigger and better programming and exhibits than ever before. Fall of 2013 can’t come quicker!

Library and Architecture staff in the soon-to-be home of the Cartoon Library

To see more images of the Sullivant Hall construction project, visit our Facebook page and check out the album “Sullivant Hall Hard Hat Tour”

PRESS RELEASE: The Hershey Foundation Answers Schulz Challenge

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The Ohio State University logo

Contact: Jenny Robb
The Ohio State University
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
27 W. 17th Avenue Mall
Columbus OH 43210-1343
614-292-0538
cartoons@osu.edu

For Immediate Release: April 10th, 2012

Hershey Foundation Answers Schulz Challenge

The Ohio State University Libraries is thrilled to announce that The Hershey Foundation of Northeast Ohio has answered the Schulz Challenge with a multi-year grant of $100,000 to support the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) facility, part of the Sullivant Hall renovation at OSU. The Hershey Foundation gift will be matched dollar for dollar by Jean Schulz, widow of Peanuts’ creator Charles M. Schulz, giving it a $200,000 impact on the project. Schulz has pledged to match all donations to the new facility up to $2.5 million. This generous grant from the Hershey Foundation brings the total raised or pledged for the Schulz Challenge to $2,380,000.

In recognition of this gift, the new BICLM office and cataloging suite will be named in honor of Peter Guren. Guren is a cartoonist and creator of the syndicated comic strip Ask Shagg, an educational feature in which his character Shagg E. Dawg answers reader’s questions about animals. Guren’s strip runs in 150 newspapers, and has provided a platform for raising awareness on environmental topics and encouraging children’s curiosity in the animal kingdom. As the husband of Debra Hershey Guren, the President and CEO of The Hershey Foundation, Guren has been the foundation’s creative force and designer for over 22 years as well as serving as their IT technician.

Since 1986, The Hershey Foundation has provided Northeast Ohio with support for children’s programming in schools, museums, and other institutions that work to enhance learning and improve the quality of children’s lives from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. To learn more, visit The Hershey Foundation website.

“The Hershey Foundation is pleased to support the capital campaign for the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in honor of Peter Guren, my cartoonist husband, who created a cartoon strip for children of all ages,” said Debra Hershey Guren, President of The Hershey Foundation. “As The Hershey Foundation supports projects that benefit children in Ohio, we know the Cartoon Library will be a great way to connect school and youth groups to the wonderful world of cartooning.”

The Sullivant Hall renovation is estimated to cost $26 million and will be completed in 2013, at which time Sullivant Hall will house the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the Department of Dance and the Department of Art Education. Upon completion of the Schulz Challenge, the Sullivant Hall renovation will be completely funded.

About the BICLM: Established in 1977 with a founding gift of the Milton Caniff Collection, the Cartoon Library & Museum was housed originally in two converted classrooms in Ohio State’s Journalism Building. Since then, thousands of donors have contributed to the collection with gifts ranging from one item to tens of thousands. The Cartoon Library & Museum now houses more than 450,000 works of original cartoon art, 45,000 books, 67,000 serials (including 29,000 comic books), 3,000 linear feet of manuscript materials, and 2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper pages.

Now the world’s largest collection of cartoon art and comics material, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is currently located in the lower level of the Wexner Center for the Arts complex. Its new, permanent home in Sullivant Hall will expand its space from 6,808 square feet to 30,000 square feet, providing much-needed additional storage and new exhibition galleries that will allow more of the collection to be displayed and made accessible to the public. For more information, see The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum website.

Download Press Release as PDF

To find out more about our expansion into Sullivant Hall in 2013, see these earlier blog posts:

Demolition underway at Sullivant Hall

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We have never been happier to see a wrecking ball!

Construction at Sullivant Hall, which will house the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

As of this past week, the stairs on the north entrance of the building have been taken down. We’re changing this aspect of the building to ensure easy accessability, and make the entrance feel as welcoming as possible to the public. Below, you can see a shot of the demolition on the stairs, and a detail of what the entrance will look like in a rendering of the plans.

Demolition of the stairs at the north entrance of Sullivant Hall

Rendering detail of the new entrance to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum by George Acock.

We’re all very excited to watch renovations progress on our beautiful new home, and will continue to post updates about it through the move!

Blog Launch, and the Construction of Our New Home in Sullivant Hall

Welcome to The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Blog! We’re very excited to join the comics blogosphere, and keep you all informed on what we’re up to. This blog will generally be updated at least twice a week with a smattering of events and activities of the Cartoon Library, highlights from our collection, interviews, and more. We hope you will add us to your feed, and continue to check back for the latest news. Please click the “About Us” tab find out more details about who we are.

For our debut post, I’d like to give a quick background on the history of the collection, culminating in some very exciting news about the move to our new home in 2013.

The Milton Caniff Reading Room opened in 1977  in two renovated classrooms in the Journalism Building of Ohio State University. Caniff [Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon] had donated in multiple installments his entire collection to OSU: 696 cubic feet of original art, correspondence, research files, photographs, memorabilia, merchandise, realia, awards, audio/visual material and scrapbooks.

Founding Curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, and Milton Caniff

Although there was no structure for collecting such materials from cartoonists, and few (if any) institutions in America were, Caniff was a proud OSU graduate and felt compelled to leave his legacy material with his beloved Alma mater. Lucy Caswell had worked in the journalism library and was hired to catalog the Caniff collection.  Caswell recognized how precious these materials were and saw that they were under-appreciated in academic institutions and museums at large.   She set out to establish an appropriate home for the collecting and preservation of cartoon art, and nearly 40 years later this altruistic goal has grown into the largest collection of cartoons and comics in the world.

The Cartoon Library in its original 1977 home in the Journalism Building. Note the ancient computer, and telephone cable wired from the ceiling!

Having grown exponentially by the early 1990s, by then containing 200,000 original cartoons and more than 1,000 linear feet of manuscript materials, the library moved into a new temperature and humidity controlled state-of-the-art facility to better house and preserve materials.

 

Cartoon Library Reading Room.  This space doubles as our exhibition gallery.  (click to enlarge)

A small portion of our art cases for originals, with single-issue comics storage in the background (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This 6,800 square-foot space has remained our home through today.   As the storage area filled up, the Library was given the opportunity to store some of its materials at a new off-site, high-density remote depository that is shared by all the Ohio State University Libraries.

Offsite Storage (click to enlarge)

Offsite Storage (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although it may seem hard to imagine , by 2012 we have almost completely run out of space.  Our current holdings have reached over 450,000 originals, nearly 40,000 books, 51,000 serial titles, 3,000 linear feet of manuscript material, and 2.5 million comic strip clippings and tearsheets– making us the largest comprehensive research collection documenting cartoon art in the world.

This is why we are in the process of building a new facility to house the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.  In 2013, we will be moving into a beautiful new home in Sullivant Hall, at the gateway to campus. This new facility will include three exhibition galleries, a large new reading room, a seminar room for educational programming, and much larger office and collection storage facilities. Our square footage will be increased from 6,800 to almost 30,000- a dream come true for a long and lovingly harvested collection that has striven to give the deserved recognition to the underdog medium that is cartoon art.  We are so incredibly thrilled and excited to settle into our new home, and endlessly thankful to those who have made the funding possible. Below, you can enjoy some artist renderings of our soon-to-be home, done by architect George Acock:

North entrance rendering

Gallery Rendering (one of 3 exhibit spaces!)

Please continue to check back here for updates and photos as the construction moves along. We hope you’ll come celebrate with us in 2013!