Special Collectors: Featured Benefactors
May 30th, 2008
Special Collectors: Featured Benefactors to Multiple Special Collections,
Gladys Keller Snowden Galleries, Geraldine Schottenstein Wing,
Campbell Hall, 1787 Neil Ave.,
Through August 30;
Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (new hours)
This exhibition celebrates the generosity and wide-ranging interests of collectors. The motivation to collect the objects in this exhibition varies as widely as the collectors who are represented. What unifies them is that more than one of the special collections at University Libraries was enriched by their impulse to collect. Some of the collections are the result of business activity. Others grew from the passion to save what otherwise might be lost. Still others reflect scholarly interest to learn more about each object as it was acquired. Whatever the original impetus, the resulting collections are wonderfully varied and this exhibition celebrates this variety in its many forms.
From buttons and film posters to toys and designer gowns, this exhibit highlights gifts-in-kind from the following collectors:
Bill Blackbeard
Bill Blackbeard established the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art in the late 1960s to preserve America’s newspaper comics that were being discarded due to microfilming. He later expanded his collecting mission to include all of narrative. When University Libraries acquired his collection in 1998, both the Cartoon Research Library and Rare Books and Manuscripts benefited from his effort.
John Burnham
John Burnham, PhD, specializes in the history of medicine and American social history and his particular interest is the history of psychiatry. Burnham is a Research Professor in the OSU Department of History, and is Professor of Psychiatry (by courtesy) in the OSU Department of Psychiatry. Burnham is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the OSU Medical Heritage Center.
Burnham and his wife, Marjorie, began salvaging books on the topic of sex education for the purposes of his graduate and postdoctoral research. He discovered the most of these materials were often missing and unavailable for research, even in the largest libraries. Burnham has donated an extensive amount of material that he has collected over the years to both Rare Books and Manuscript Library and also to the Medical Heritage Center.
Marochka (Maggie) and Charles Chatfield-Taylor
Marochka (“Maggie”) Chatfield-Taylor, born in St. Petersburg, Russia July 24, 1906, was the daughter of the well-known Russian theatre and opera designer Boris Anisfeld (1879-1873) who emigrated to the United States during the Russian revolution. Anisfeld designed for the Metropolitan Opera from 1918-1927, and then became professor of advanced painting at the Chicago Art Institute where Marochka attended school. She was an artist herself and painted murals for cafes and bars and designed high-fashion clothing. She married Otis Chatfield-Taylor in 1936. He was from a socially prominent Chicago family, and earned his living as a journalist, playwright and Broadway producer. After his death in 1948, she created her own gowns under the Maggie Taylor label, which ceased in 1954 when she moved to Washington, D.C. As Marochka Anisfeld, she had a brief career on Broadway, appearing in Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1928). Marochka donated clothing and accessories to the Historic Costume & Textiles Collection, including one of her “Maggie Taylor” designs. She and her son Charles donated oil paintings and costume sketches by Boris Anisfeld to The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute
Ivan Gilbert
Ivan Gilbert, Columbus native, medical doctor, entrepreneur and 2007 inductee in the Ohio State Athletics Hall of Fame for fencing, has been a collector his entire life. A collector of art and artifacts, Dr. Gilbert’s greatest collecting area has been books, manuscripts and ephemera. His extensive trade catalog collection was added to Rare Books and Manuscripts in 2005. Gilbert has also donated books and materials related to his interest in local and medical history to the Medical Heritage Center.
Toni Mendez
Toni Mendez (1908-2003) was a former Rockette and choreographer who established her own licensing business in the late 1940s. She subsequently marketed products using many cartoon characters, including Bernard Kliban’s cat. In her personal life, she favored designer gowns and suits from the House of Patou. Mendez gave her papers to the Cartoon Research Library and her designer clothing to the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection.
Tom Minnick
Tom Minnick started collecting anything related to or by William Blake, and that led him to collecting prints which led to collecting paintings. Because Blake knew Wedgwood, Minnick started collecting eighteenth-century ceramics, then native American ceramics, and then folk art. The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Cartoon Research Library have benefited from Minnick’s wide-ranging collecting interests.
Ann and Emanuel Rudolph
Ann and Emanuel Rudolph enjoyed a living aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement: their house was an Arts and Crafts house; their furniture was Arts and Crafts furniture; they collected Roycrofter’s books. Ann Rudolph’s extensive button collection and their combined 53,000 plus library was bequeathed to the Ohio State University Libraries. In particular, Emanuel Rudolph’s Children’s Science Collection is a world class collection of over 8,000 items.
Philip Sills
Philip Sills (1920-1988) was a partner in the brokerage firm of Sills, Zoppa and Associates which had real estate holdings throughout the United States. He also owned Mediterranean Shipping, company, a freight line based in Switzerland. From 1947 to 1977 he operated a highly respected apparel company that featured the leathers he also imported. In 1953 Bonnie Cashin became the designer for Sills and Company. The garments created during this partnership are remarkable for their combinations of textures of mohairs, leathers, tweeds, knits, suedes, canvas and fur. Bonnie Cashin was inspired by clothing shapes from around the globe including those of ponchos and kimono; her Noh coat was a standard design. Cashin also incorporated innovative hardware closures in her garments and in the bags she designed for Coach, an accessories company she helped launch in 1962. He was a founder of the Fashion Institute of Technology (N.Y.), the Albert Einstein Medical College and an organizer of the First Women’s Bank of New York Sills donated to both the Cartoon Research Library and the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection.
Sylvia Westerman
Sylvia Westerman (1933-1995) was one of the first women to reach senior management levels in network television news, serving as vice president of three major national news organizations. As producer of The Watergate Tapes for CBS News, she received the Emmy Award in 1974. Westerman was a passionate lover of the arts whose knowledge of ballet and theatre design rivaled that of many experts. She was a knowledgeable collector of theatre design art, focusing especially on Russian and ballet designs, and she left her outstanding collection to the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. Sylvia Westerman was also very interested in bringing together collectors and OSU collections. She was responsible for introducing to the Lawrence and Lee Institute collector Paul Stiga who has continued her legacy of theatre design donation, as well as the family of director/producer Robert Breen who donated his papers documenting the major 1950s production of Porgy and Bess which toured the United States, Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. Westerman was also responsible for building the relationship between Marochka Chatfield-Taylor and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Library at OSU, the results of which are seen in this exhibition.
Westerman’s father, Harry Westerman, was the cartoonist for the Columbus Journal. She contributed a large collection of his original work to the Cartoon Research Library.
Ed Hoffman, owner of Hoffman’s Bookshop and a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, will speak on June 25, 2008, at 6 p.m. in room 252 Campbell Hall. His lecture will be preceded by refreshments at 5:30 p.m. in the Columbia Gas Lounge on the second floor of Campbell Hall. Please RSVP to 614-247-6509 if you wish to attend this public event.
Entry Filed under: Exhibits Archives
