Archive

Cover of “Growing Older Female,” undated pamphlet, Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation. Featuring an image by Käthe Kollwitz. UUWF Records collection, Meadville Lombard Theological School

In the United States March is Women’s History Month, a time to remember and celebrate women’s contributions to history, culture, and society. And thanks to our contributing partners, JSTOR has an abundance of women-focused primary source collections that are free for everyone to access and use.

Last year we compiled a selection of Artstor and JSTOR collections that mostly centered on the achievement  of individual women. This year we’re sharing collections that cover women’s group efforts in fighting for equal rights, making the workplace more fair, and advancing their roles in religion.

Women’s Rights

Edinburgh Ladies’ Debating Society
The complete runs of two journals, The Attempt (1865-74) and The Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine (1875-80), featuring contributions from women who became prominent figures in education, suffrage, and welfare.

Alexis Irwin, Reproductive Rights, 2019. Poster. Image and data from Hope College: Beyond the Women’s & Gender Studies Classroom

Hope College: Beyond the Women’s & Gender Studies Classroom (Artstor Public Collection)
The work of students in Hope College’s Introduction to Women’s & Gender Studies class—including digital zines, pamphlets, posters, poetry, and art—addressing topics such as feminism’s definition and political goals, reproductive justice, women’s spirituality, sexual assault prevention and recovery, and body image.

Tee Corinne, cover of WOMANSPIRIT, Volume 5, Issue 19, 1979. From the Reveal Digital Independent Voices collection.

Reveal Digital Feminist Collection (Part of Independent Voices)
More than 75 magazines, newsletters, and newspapers created by activists and collectives that helped propel the second wave of feminism from the late sixties and early seventies through the end of the 20th century.

Eve Arnold on the set of Becket. 1963. Photograph by Robert Penn. © Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos.

“It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument. ” – Eve Arnold

In honor of Women’s History Month we are celebrating the brave sisterhood that influenced the early years of photojournalism, and its successors who have shaped the fields of social and environmental documentary photography. The journey begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the birth of photography, flourishes in the analog boom years of print, and rises again with digital technology. In the words of photojournalist Yunghi Kim, it is the spirit of “visual storytelling” that unites the mission.

Unknown. Beals standing on top of a ladder, holding her camera. 1904. Photograph. Image and data from The Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection.

Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother. 1936. Photograph. Image and data from Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress.

Margaret Bourke-White. Maiden Lane, Georgia. c. 1936. Photograph. Image and data from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Women photographers were recognized for their work in the field long before the term photojournalism was coined at the University of Missouri in the 1940s. Jesse Beals Tarbox, shown here on assignment at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, perched on a ladder behind an outsized camera, was the first recognized woman in news photography. Dorothea Lange is acclaimed for her Farm Security Administration photographs, including the series Migrant Mother, 1936. She received a foundation in Pictorial photography from Arnold Genthe at the Clarence H. White School. She went on to work for the government in the 1940s and was later hired by Life, traveling to Asia, South America, and the Middle East. Professionally trained in the 1920s and a contemporary of Lange, Margaret Bourke-White was the first foreign photographer to work in the Soviet Union, the only westerner to document the German invasion of Moscow and one of the first photojournalists to be embedded with air crews and the liberators of the concentration camps in Germany during World War II. She is also known for images of the hardships of the Depression era, as seen in the double portrait shown here. The German photographer Gerda Taro died in the field in 1937 in an accident during the Spanish Civil War. At the age of 26, she was the first female photographer to die “in action,” underscoring the tragic association between photojournalism and war at mid century.

James Hampton. The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, detail. c.1950-1964, mixed media. Image and data from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image and data from Society of Architectural Historians. Photograph © Dell Upton.

“Pictures just come to my mind, and I tell my heart to go ahead” – Horace Pippin¹

We have gathered a selection of the works of African American self-taught artists to honor Black History Month. Through time, the output of Black creators in America has been labeled “primitive,” “naive,” “folk art,” “self-taught,” and more recently, “black vernacular.”² The common ground for all of these artists is that their work springs from lived experiences, filtered through highly personal lenses, and characterized by the innovative use of found or recycled materials. The lives of these individuals were shaped by a history that ingrained violence, poverty and racism, and excluded access to academic training: Slavery, the challenges of The Restoration, The Great Migration, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights period mark the works of these artists. The foil to the hardships was intense religious inspiration and the ability to mine the beauty from shared and singular experiences in the family and the community.

Happy Black History Month! A year ago we shared a selection of image and primary source collections on Artstor and JSTOR that focused on Black history. Today, we have more than 20 community-contributed collections to add to that list—all free to access and download on JSTOR.

Cover of Black Dialogue, 07-01-1970, from Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices collection

Black American Independent Voices (Reveal Digital)
Independent Voices provides scholars unprecedented access to writings and thoughts of those who led and participated in movements such as Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Black Nationalism, Separatism, and Black Feminism.

Black Perspective (Lehman College, CUNY Leonard Lief Library)
A student-initiated cultural publication, Black Perspective was published from April 1972 to October 1974, and its 20 issues focused on the perceived needs and concerns of Black people at Lehman College and in society at large.

Artstor and JSTOR offer more than a million freely accessible images and other materials from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials. The collections are constantly growing, and as we browsed for Latin American content in preparation for Hispanic Heritage Month, we were delighted by what we found. Here are some notable highlights:

Anthony Stevens Acevedo. Ruins of the Church and Convent building complex of San Francisco. 2011. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, First Blacks in the Americas collection.

Leslie Jiménez. All for All. 2012. CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Condition - My Place Our Longing / Condición: Mi Lugar Nuestro Anhelo collection. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

Doris Rodriguez. Les Delices des Quatre Saisons I. 2011. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States.

City College Dominican Library First Blacks in the Americas

(Artstor | JSTOR)
A history project devoted to disseminating research and rigorous information about the earliest people of Black African descent that arrived, resided, and stayed in the Americas from 1492 onwards, and whose continued presence in the New World ever since is clearly shown on historical records.

City College: Fighting for Democracy: Dominican Veterans from World War II

(Artstor | JSTOR)
A pioneering exhibit about courage, valor, and commitment consisting of 12 panels in which photographs, documents, correspondence, newspaper articles, and short biographies tell the stories of Dominicans that served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Condition – My Place Our Longing / Condición: Mi Lugar Nuestro Anhelo

(Artstor)
The art exhibit Condition: My Place Our Longing / Condición: Mi Lugar Nuestro Anhelo highlights the work of Dominican artists Leslie Jiménez and Julianny Ariza. It showcases original pieces produced between 2011 and 2012 that explore the subject of living in between, in two worlds, and other conditions of living.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States – Doris Rodríguez

(Artstor | JSTOR)
This collection focuses on the artist Doris Rodríguez, an artist and award-winning author and illustrator. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and her native Dominican Republic.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States – Josefina Báez

(Artstor | JSTOR)
This collection focuses on the artist Josefina Baez, storyteller, performer, writer, theater director, educator, and devotee. She is the founder of the Ay Ombe Theater.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States – Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

(Artstor | JSTOR)
This collection focuses on the artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, whose works gain permanence through audios, photographs, props, drawings, rumors, embodied memories, costumes, websites, videos and publications.

While 2021 had its share of jolts, schools and libraries began to regain their footing after the shocks of 2020 and started looking forward. And Artstor did as well, as we continued to make progress on the integration with JSTOR and on furthering the diversity of our content.

More diverse content and Open Artstor collections

Our ongoing efforts to bring more African American and ethnically diverse resources to Artstor and JSTOR started making their appearance in the middle of 2021, and we look forward to more releases this year.

Two buttons. Image and original data from the New York Public Library. No copyright.

Samuel Palmer. The Harvest Moon. c. 1833. Image and data from the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

As the strength of the sun wanes in the fall, our festivities and rites tend to be centered on the elements of fire and light — natural, divine, and synthetic. It is no accident that many of our brightest celebrations light up our darkest months. Below, we have selected some images that collectively exalt the power of light to animate our revels.

We are currently working on integrating Artstor on JSTOR. When you search JSTOR today you will find Artstor’s 2+ million images in your results, bringing together critical scholarship and high-quality images on one platform.

As the year progresses, we will be adding tools for working and teaching with images, making your experience even better. We have several ways you can follow our progress, or you can simply sign up to get updates in your inbox.

We are doing this because we believe that by combining images with essential scholarship, you’ll strengthen the depth and quality of your research, make innovative connections, and spark unexpected discoveries.

Browse the Artstor collections on JSTOR | Try an image search on JSTOR

Art Historian Magda Salvesen, author of Artists’ Estates: Reputations in Trust, writes about the emotional aspect of her work as the curator of the estate of her husband, the American painter Jon Schueler.

Jon Schueler. Next Summer. 1966. Oil on canvas. Image and data from the Jon Schueler Estate.

“Art must take reality by surprise,” the writer Françoise Sagan said in a 1965 interview. With the arrival of Covid-19, however, I have frequently found myself considering the reversal of these terms.

The sudden closure of a Jon Schueler exhibition in March 2020, two postponements of other shows, the absence of studio visits by potential clients or gallery reps, and the inability of my assistants to return any time soon ironically created what I had long desired: open time, month after month, to work on the Jon Schueler Archive.

Black History Month is observed every February in the United States and Canada, and we’re celebrating by gathering a number of Artstor’s Public Collections about the history and culture of African Americans. These collections are freely available to everyone everywhere, no log-in required!

Shirley Chisholm. Not dated. Copyright: Tuskegee University Archives, 2016.

Tuskegee University’s Civil Rights audio collections
Recordings and photographs of speeches from prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. We also interviewed archivist Dana Chandler, who digitized the original reel-to-reel tapes.