#ryerson and burnham libraries

The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries will be closed from 4:00 on Friday, June 15, until 1:00 on Monday, June 25. During this time we will be replacing the carpet in the reading room. We hope that you enjoy these images from Étoffes & tapis étrangers, a catalog from the 1925 art deco exhibition in Paris, while we are away. You can keep updated on the carpeting project over on our Facebook page.

The Reading Room will be closed on Monday, May 28 for Memorial Day. In the meantime, please enjoy these images for Let the Artist Speak: Teacher’s Broadcast Handbook. This mimeographed handbook accompanied a series of broadcasts on Chicago’s WIND radio station that were designed to interest 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade students in art. Here you see the cover, the credit page for the cover design, and a page of text and two images associated with the “Soldier Artists: Art in the Camps” broadcast that aired on January 6, 1943.

Please come in to view this and other works about art and the armed forces when our reading room re-opens at 1:00 on Tuesday, May 29. Thank you to all those artists who have served and who continue to serve our country.

Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine opens tomorrow. We’re excited to announce a public program being held in conjunction with this exhibition, Percier & Fontaine: A Master Class in Architectural Prints and Drawings, which will take place at 6:00 on Thursday, February 8.

Join Iris Moon, assistant curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, for the illustrated talk “Building between the Leaves: The Post-Revolutionary Architectural Interior in the Books of Percier and Fontaine.” Following the talk meet in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries to view and discuss the exhibition Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine and to look at additional library materials with our speaker and the exhibition curator, Alyse Muller, research associate in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then proceed to the Print Studio of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a demonstration of printing techniques by Shaurya Kumar, associate professor in the Department of Printmedia, to learn how the illustrations in the books of Percier and Fontaine were created.

Registration is required for the library and print studio portions of the event. To register, please email [email protected].

Here you see two plates from Percier and Fontaine’s Recueil de décorations intérieures… (Paris: Chez les Auteurs, 1812.), as well as an image of Louis Messidor Lebon Petitot’s painted plaster sculptures,  Bust of Pierre François Leonard Fontaine (1839) and Bust of Charles Percier(1838).

In honor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries will be closed on Monday, January 15. We will re-open for public hours on Tuesday, January 16, at 1:00. 

This linoleum print by Elizabeth Catlett, titled “My Right Is a Future of Equality with Other Americans,” comes from The Negro Woman portfolio of 1946-1947. The image of a woman looking forward to a brighter future calls to mind Dr. King’s dream that: 

“One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’.”

The image is reproduced from the 2005 exhibition catalog Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People, which is available in our reference collection.

The staff of the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries wishes you a happy new year! The reading room will be closed on Monday, January 1, re-opening at 1:00 on Tuesday, January 2. In the meantime, here are some 15th-century New Year’s greetings:

A woodcut from 1466 with an image of a ship reading “A good new year;”

a woodcut from 1470 depicting the new year, in the form of a child, at the city gate;

a woodcut from 1482, printed by Peter Drach, of Speyer, from a drawing by the Master of the Housebook;

a woodcut dated between 1450 and 1465 with an image of a ship and a child bringing good luck for the new year; and

The title page for Paul Heitz’s 1917 book, in which these images are found.

The publication consists of a brief essay on the New Year’s greeting tradition, followed by a checklist and a series of plates illustrating 30 examples of these greetings, most of which feature the Christ child representing the promise of the new year. These ephemeral prints would be given to friends on single sheets, or used by printers to decorate calendars.

We wish all of you exciting research voyages and the very best of luck in 2018.

These Christmas cards were made by Clara Powers Wilson, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the 1950s. The staff of the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries wish you a warm and wonderful holiday. The Reading Room will be closed for the holiday on Monday, December 25, and Tuesday, December 26, but if you would like to see Wilson’s scrapbook, we will look forward to seeing you when we open on Wednesday, December  27.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries. The reading room will close one hour early, at 4:00, on Wednesday, November 22, and will remain closed Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24 for the holiday. Please come in during our public hours on Monday, November 27, when you can request the book containing these images, John James Audubon’s Birds of America from Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories.

Information on the turkey appears in volume five, which was published by V. G. Audubon and C. S. Francis and Company in New York in 1855.John James Audubon wrote the text in this edition, incorporating research as well as his own observations of the birds from his travels. He was impressed by the turkey, noting:

The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as a delicate and      highly prized article of food, and the circumstance of its being the origin of the domestic race now generally dispersed over both continents, render it one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.

Here you see two of Audubon’s images of the turkey: Wild Turkey, Male and Wild Turkey, Female & Young, in lithographs printed and colored by J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia.

Have a delicious Thanksgiving!

The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries and the family of John Garrett Thorpe are pleased to announce the donation to the Ryerson & Burnham Archives of the John Garrett Thorpe & Associates Collection.

John Garrett Thorpe (1944–2016) was an architect and distinguished historic preservation advocate who, along with his architectural firm, provided restoration and preservation services on 55 buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and 68 projects by other Prairie School architects. One of the authors for The Plan for Restoration and Adaptive Use of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Thorpe acted to secure its purchase by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust and to implement a 13-year restoration project on the building. The John Garrett Thorpe & Associates Collection in the Ryerson & Burnham Archives consists of thousands of architectural drawings as well as project files on 33 projects designed by Wright and 27 projects by other Prairie School architects.

Once the collection has been processed by our archives staff, these materials will be available for use in the reading room of the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries, along with the Ryerson & Burnham Archives’ other rich holdings on Sullivan, Wright, the Prairie School, and Organic Architecture.

Here you see elevations from the Thorpe Collection for the Hemingway Birthplace Home and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arthur Heurtley House, both located in Oak Park, Illinois.