Browse Exhibits (26 total)

Under the Federal Arts program, the main goal was not only to fund artists who created paintings but also to allocate that art to public places such as government buildings, schools, or hospitals. The Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Mt. Morris was one such location where paintings from a variety of locations were allocated—to the best of our knowledge, originating in New York City and Woodstock, NY. This exhibit takes the additional step of looking at these paintings in terms of where they originated, and the importance of that social space during the 1930s. The New Deal Gallery paintings evoke stability and nostalgia (if only for a moment) but also a sometimes-ecological recognition of the land that America has to offer. That couldn't be taken for granted during the 1930s, and it's hard to see how we could ignore those lessons today. Update Jan. 2020: a portion of this exhibit was recognized by Esri as a finalist for the "2019 StoryMapper of the Year" contest.

This exhibit uses the New Deal Gallery collection as a case study for at least three ways of thinking about conservation: as an issue concerning art museums and archives generally; as an urgent environmental issue, specifically during the 1930s; and as an ethical issue encompassing those first two discourses along with many others. What does our culture choose to conserve? What choices have led to conditions of neglect? The New Deal era offered blunt assessments of unsustainable practices because it had no other choice; it created innovative conservation practices we have forgotten and need to remember quickly. Caretaking ignores false categories, and the pages of this exhibit approach the New Deal Gallery itself as one such site of neglect and conservation.

The disastrous combination of industrialization and anthropogenic climate change that inspired the Green New Deal exhibits has transformed so many environments and homes to the point of unfamiliarity, eliciting a sense of sorrow and wistfulness at the negatively transformed space from the loss of one’s place of solace. This melancholy is similar to that of nostalgia but for a word rooted in the meaning “to return home,” it is not applicable for those who are already “home.” Thus, Glenn Albrecht aptly names this emotion “solastalgia,” based off the ideas of solace and desolation: “Solace has meanings connected to the alleviation of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events. Desolation has meanings connected to abandonment and loneliness. The suffix -algia has connotations of pain or suffering...Solastalgia, simply put, is ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home.’” 

July 26, 1902 was a day like many others for the 72-year-old Sheffield Peabody: he “drawed out” a load of hay from a field that had been mowed ten days before, and his son George L. went to church in Canadice that afternoon.  But his journal also records that “They have connected the telephone system with Springwater Central.  We can talk with the people in the valley.”  It may be hard for us to appreciate what a transformative moment this was; each time Sheffield wrote, as he often did, that he “went down to the valley,” the distance was four miles on dirt roads, with an elevation drop (or ascent) of more than 1,000 vertical feet, traveled by horse-drawn wagon or sleigh.  In 1885, having served as a juror for a murder trial held in Geneseo, Sheffield stayed at the home of Nelson Willis that night, traveled to Springwater the next morning, walked home from the Erie Railroad depot, then “commenced sowing barley” before finally pruning his orchard toward nightfall (11-12 May, 1885).  Telephones dramatically transformed all of these activities in a spatial but also a cultural sense.

This exhibit begins from an anachronous perspective—our own society whose informational, economic, and social networks are taken for granted.  Increasingly, we meet these needs without physical travel, through online or cloud technologies.  What did Sheffield’s networks look like?  How did he meet these needs?  Our premise is that a man for whom the term “went” is among the most common in his journals—“I went over to George Higgins’ today”; “I went to the valley”—enacted these networks in physical space, as we sometimes do but to a much lesser extent in the 21^st century.  Through a combination of targeted questions and (word) mapping visualizations, Sheffield’s apparently simple life on a farm becomes much richer and socially complex.  The exploratory essays are organized under three broad headings: The Social Network, which maps Sheffield’s relations with various groups of people outside of his family; Circuits, which explores his farm as an economic node in relation to a circulation of mutual commerce & interdependency; and The Safety Net, focusing upon his later years and the need for medical, financial, and emotional support.

The Perry Knitting Company was formed in 1881, began operations in 1883, and closed its doors in 1969. During much of that period it was the town's largest firm, directly employing perhaps a third of the community and indirectly accounting for many more livelihoods. For the first half of its history the company produced underwear sold to wholesale brokers called "jobbers"; after World War II, its "Nitey Nite" line of children's sleepwear was nationally known for its quality. The PK, as it was called informally in Perry, had an outsized economic, political, and social influence. This exhibit begins to assess those legacies, the better to understand how deindustrialization affected small rural communities and to explore bioregional responses going forward.

Unfortunately any archival record of the company's past has unspooled. Two fires during the 1970s--one of them a case of arson--destroyed buildings that may have contained important documents. Others ended up in the landfill. And in any case a knitting mill simply trying to survive amidst a competitive market probably had little inclination to preserve records for posterity. Any attempt at an oral history has been stymied in this year of 2020 by a coronavirus pandemic, and the reality that most employees of the mill no longer are living. The exhibit here therefore makes use of three collections from the Perry Public Library that give us partial, indirect glimpses into the PK: selected documents presevered by Henry Page, a local historian; digitized copies of the Perry Herald newspaper; and more than 7,000 images from the Clark Rice Photography Collection. Where the archival record gives out, we sometimes make use of speculative nonfiction. As described by Robin Hemley and Leila Philip it's a mode of writing that, instead of seeking after the narrowly factual or informative, "concerns itself with the figurative over the literal, ambiguity over knowing, meditation over reportage."