-Research by Micah Messenheimer in the Prints and Photographs Division and Jake Bozza, formerly of the Manuscript Division, contributed to this report. It turns out that William “Bill” Kennoch, one of the nation’s top counterfeit detectives in the chaotic post-Civil War era, didn’t have any nifty nicknames, such as “Dollar” or “Wild.” He was a rather …
Wendy Red Star is a Native American visual artist whose work has received widespread acclaim and been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly called the "genius grant." Her work is also collected at the Library. In this short essay, she writes about a research trip to the Library and how the collections inform her work.
The Library has worked for more than two decades to boost its holdings of modern Native American art and now has more than 200 prints and photographs by more than 50 contemporary Indigenous printmakers and photographers from the United States, Canada and Latin America. These include dazzling works by artists and photographers such as Wendy Red Star, Kay Walkingstick, Brian Adams, Zig Jackson and Rick Bartow.
Journalist, photographer and activist Raúl Ruiz was a driving force at La Raza, the newspaper and magazine devoted to the Chicano movement in the 1960s and '70s. The Library announced today that it has acquired his collection, some 17,500 photos by Ruiz and original page layouts for La Raza. It also has nearly 10,000 pages of manuscripts, which include original correspondence, the unpublished draft of Ruiz’s book on Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar and handwritten minutes from the staff meetings of La Raza. It's a major addition to the Library's holdings in modern Hispanic culture.
Maya Freelon’s immersive exhibition “Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States” at Historic Stagville in Durham, North Carolina, drew on Library materials to a new lens on the lives of enslaved children at a former plantation.
—This is a guest post by Adam M. Silvia, a curator in the Prints and Photographs Division. As a photojournalist, Taro Yamasaki photographed at-risk children in the United States and around the world — Nicaragua, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Middle East. The Prints and Photographs Division recently acquired three collections that document such work by the …
From saplings to centenarians, the fabled cherry blossom trees of Washington, D.C., entice more than 1.5 million visitors to the capital each spring. The initial 1912 gift of 3,020 cherry trees from the city of Tokyo to Washington launched such treasured and enduring traditions as the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which officially began in 1927. We look at some of the marvelous festival posters that have advertised and celebrated the festival.
The Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of photographs and prints are copyright-free, yours to use anyway you like. This set of winter photos offers a window in the worlds of lost arts of ice harvesting, snowshoe-making and finally, the society set of snowbirds in Palm Beach, Florida, in the 1950s.
Richard Morris Hunt was perhaps the most influential American architect of the late 19th century. He went to Paris to study, then returned to spread the Beaux-Arts gospel and give America architecture that matched its ambitions. He designed castles that defined the Gilded Age, such as Breakers and Marble House in Rhode Island, and the Biltmore in North Carolina. The Library preserves his papers and has just published "The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt" in association with Giles Ltd.
