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Tag: ephemera

American Art and Portrait Gallery Library Celebrates their Volunteers and the Allentown Art Museum Vertical File Donation

Alexandra Reigle
April 28, 2016
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Paul and Janet, two volunteers at the AAPG Library who helped with the Allentown Vertical File Donation.
Paul and Janet, two volunteers at the AAPG Library who helped with the Allentown Vertical File Donation.

April is volunteer appreciation month and the American Art and Portrait Gallery (AAPG) Library would like to take the opportunity to highlight both the completion of a project as well as the volunteers that made it happen. The Allentown Art Museum donated their collection of artist vertical files to the AAPG Library in early November 2014 that consisted of ephemeral materials related to nearly 4,600 artists. The AAPG library was especially interested in the collection’s native Pennsylvanian artists who were missing from our Art and Artists File (AAF) collection.

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Spiral: Discussing the Role of African American Artists in the Civil Rights Movement

Alexandra Reigle
February 26, 2016
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Cover of the Spiral exhibition catalogue
Cover of the Spiral exhibition catalogue

We are always finding great materials in our Art and Artists Files at the American Art and Portrait Gallery Library and we’re excited it to share it with the public. In our mission to provide greater access to our ephemera files, we are working on adding our corporate files to the Art and Artist Files database. The corporate files contain ephemera (catalogues, pamphlets, exhibition invitations. etc.) produced for group exhibitions by galleries, museums, and other institutions. This of course is a long process, requiring a lot of review of materials in the folders, but it has been a great way to rediscover items that we didn’t know we had!

 

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Corcoran Artist Vertical File collection donated to the Smithsonian Libraries

Anne Evenhaugen
December 18, 2015
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Alexander Liberman Catalog from the CGA ephemera files.
Alexander Liberman Catalog from the CGA ephemera files.

The Smithsonian Libraries is pleased to announce the donation of research ephemera for more than 8,000 artists from the Corcoran Gallery of Art (CGA) in Washington, D.C., to be housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery (AA/PG) Library.

Dan Graham and Marilyn Levine ephemera
Dan Graham and Marilyn Levine ephemera

The Smithsonian AA/PG Library recently acquired the Artist Vertical File collection from the Trustees of the Corcoran, which encompasses a large collection of published ephemera related to artists, with particular strength in Washington D.C.-based artists and those who worked during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program.

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Ephemeral Thoughts during the Waning Days of Summer

Julia Blakely
September 3, 2014
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Cherry blossoms along the Tital Basin. Photo by Julia Blakely.
Cherry blossoms along the Tital Basin. Photo by Julia Blakely.

This post was written by rare books cataloger Julia Blakely. It originally appeared on the Smithsonian Collections Blog.

The spectacular display of the capital cherry trees of this year is but a happy, distant memory and the gardens of Washington have that hot, exhausted look of August, escaping into a rare gardening book is in order. The Cullman Library has a survivor of an ephemeral form of publication—nursery trade catalogs—that are valuable not only for their pictures (documenting different techniques of illustrating processes) but as research sources on introduction of plants into the trade as well as trends in horticultural fashion. L. Boehmer & Co. in Yokohama, Japan, produced for the 1899-1900 season the Catalogue of Japanese lilybulbs, iris and other flower roots, trees, shrubs, plants, seeds, etc.

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