Project Overview

Kolaj Institute, Kasini House’s Art Meets History initiative, The Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History and its Stewart-Swift Research Center teamed up to produce a collection of collage prints that interpreted the museum’s archive material for a 21st century international audience, in celebration of the Research Center’s 50th anniversary. An exhibition of the prints took place 2 September 2022 to 26 August 2023 at the Henry Sheldon Museum and Kolaj Institute published a companion book about the project, Artists in the Archives. Lead Curator for the project was Ric Kasini Kadour, in collaboration with Eva Garcelon-Hart, Stewart-Swift Research Center Archivist, and Taylor Rossini, Henry Sheldon Museum Collections Associate. In addition, Kolaj Institute organized a residency for collage artists, who responded to a Call to Artists, on how to work with archives in May 2022.

Each of the collage prints speaks to an idea about community and how the historical material in the archive shapes our sense of community. The idea of community was interpreted locally, as in Middlebury, Vermont, but also in terms of what the material in the archive says about communities across Vermont, across New England, and, ultimately, in a globalized, 21st century world.

The project celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stewart-Swift Research Center as a designated archival repository. Henry Luther Sheldon (1821-1907) established the Sheldon Art Museum in 1882 and dedicated the remainder of his life to its care and development. Sadly, the museum was shuttered upon his death in 1907. “The Sheldon Museum came back to life in the 1930s, when Middlebury College’s W. Storrs Lee and art historian Arthur K.D. Healy inspected the building and started to look at the collection in detail. They were amazed by its quality and rallied a group of townspeople to help restore the old museum.”

In 1972, the Board of the museum was concerned about losing the valuable paper archive, which is considered the best documentation of a particular community in the entire region. This documentation is both meticulous and broad at the same time. Therefore, the Board decided to build a separate space to house the archive, which was followed by an environmentally controlled vault to preserve it. The Board feared that if the archive was left in the Sheldon Museum’s original 1829 building, it would be destroyed.

The Research Center “was a pretty large initiative, which was very costly in 1972 for a small community. Here we are fifty years later,” said Eva Garcelon-Hart, Stewart-Swift Research Center Archivist. “It was a fairly heroic act on the part of the community.”

“Henry Sheldon’s founding of the museum was an individual act of an inspired collector. The creation of the Research Center is a great example of the community coming together to invest in its heritage for future generations,” said Curator Ric Kasini Kadour. “Fifty years ago, the community founded this Research Center, built its building, and made the material it holds accessible to everyone. That’s a caring community in action.

Taylor Rossini, Henry Sheldon Museum Collections Associate, said, “As a non-profit and a local museum, we only have the ability to keep stewarding and preserving these objects as long as the community is invested in that venture. If people don’t want to support the museum, don’t donate, and lose interest, this whole thing falls apart. There’s a way in which the members of the community are truly active stakeholders in this preservation project of the museum as a whole, the building and its holdings.”

“Communities are more than groups of people living next to one other. Communities are about how those people work together towards a common good. This involves the interactions between people, the exchange of goods and services, and the sharing of knowledge,” said Kadour. “Communities need a shared emotional connection. That comes from having a shared history or a shared sense of history. This is why local history museums are critical to making healthy communities. They are a place where people go to learn about the past and develop a shared sense of history.”

COLLAGE FORUM 

European Collagists’ Perspectives on American Archives

Saturday, March 11th, 2023. Five artists who participated in the project did so from Europe. What did their unique perspective draw from the archive?

COLLAGE FORUM 

Beyond Humans

Wednesday, February 8th, 2023. A community is made of more than humans. As part of their investigation into the archives of the Henry Sheldon Museum’s Stewart-Swift Research Center, collage artists considered what non-human elements shape our communities.

COLLAGE FORUM

Women in the Archive

Wednesday, December 14th, 2022. In the past, the history of women’s lives and experiences was marginalized in favor of a “Great Man” approach to history, but in the last fifty years, greater attention to women’s history has produced a rich understanding of women’s lives in the past. Materials relevant to women’s studies are well-represented in the Stewart-Swift Research Center’s collections.

COLLAGE FORUM

Absence in the Archive

Wednesday, November 9th, 2022. No archive or collection is perfect and not all people of a community are well-represented in an archive. How do we make sense of these absences and how can we make archives more representative of the whole community?