Mellon Archives Innovation Program #3: The Glass Lantern Slide Collection

How do the presences and absences of this collection tell us something about Black American and diasporic art and art history? How can we examine these omissions for what they tell us about how histories get institutionalized? This Mellon Archives Innovation Program will focus on two key works by prominent Black American artists nestled in the Glass Lantern Slides, a collection of more than 60,000 glass lantern slides acquired from the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. They cover art and architectural history from the Paleolithic period to the Modern era. We will examine Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1859 painting Moonlight-Tangiers and Richmond Barthé’s 1942 sculpture Workman as these objects color the way western art history functions as an educational discipline while they simultaneously tell us particular stories about Black aesthetic practices.

Join us on October 23rd at 3 pm for this Mellon Archives Innovation Program as we focus on these two slides as examples of the abundant lessons contained within the Glass Lantern Slides Collection.

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In August 2022, Rebuild Foundation launched the Mellon Archives Innovation Program—a multifaceted initiative supporting the creation of new research, scholarship, and artistic production through engagement with Rebuild Foundation’s archival collections at the Stony Island Arts Bank.

Over the course of the next two years, Rebuild Foundation will fund and support the creation of new work inspired by our four permanent archives. The four inaugural fellows are singer, songwriter, and musician Corrine Bailey Rae, interdisciplinary performing artist Yaw Agyeman; professor and performance studies scholar Dr. Honey Crawford; and composer and cornetist Ben LaMar Gay.

The Mellon Archives Innovation Program also makes space for the public to engage with the ongoing research and exploration taking place in the archives. Collection tours and a speaker series will invite fellows and researchers to showcase and discuss select objects from the collections at the Arts Bank. Learn more about the initiative, programs, and fellows at www.rebuild-foundation.org.