Although everyone at The Arts Club is still working on their usual tasks, you can definitely tell the club is gearing up for the 100th anniversary. This is lucky for me because it means I keep being sent to the Newberry Library to explore the archives. There are many series that have vague titles, so it has been my job to find out what is in the folders.
Last week the Director asked if I would investigate the series dedicated to the membership history. They were interested in finding out how membership was organized back when the club was established. I must admit being able to work with documents from the 1920s was a unique experience, and reading some of the old correspondence (including telegrams!) was fascinating. It was amazing to read the letters documenting the exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica. I had a hard time processing the fact that at the time it was an unknown painting and the Arts Club actually had to be convinced to exhibit it in Chicago!
Another project connected to the 100th anniversary is the creation of a new catalogue, which will include entries for all of the Club’s acquisitions since the late 1990s. To do research for this project I was introduced to yet another library, the Flaxman, which is part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This library is extremely useful because it houses many exhibition catalogues, which contain critical essays and biographies of artists. Although I have collected information on several artists my supervisor asked me to attempt to write a catalogue entry for a large painting by Alex Katz, which is displayed on the second floor of the Club.
As a practice I wrote a wall text (the short paragraphs you would see on the wall of a museum), which turned out to be an extremely difficult task! These texts can only be about 150 words, but still need to contain both background information and critical analysis. I had a difficult time figuring out what type of tone to use since wall texts are a lot different from the essays I have written for my classes at Tulane. Eventually I expanded on this text to write a full 600-word catalogue entry. My supervisor and I have been going back and forth making corrections, and I hope to finish it up this week!