Blog Category: Highlights

Happy Earth Day! We’ve gathered 26 open collections on JSTOR that feature breathtaking documentation of our planet and its creatures by scientists, scholars, and artists across many eras, all free for everyone to enjoy.

Jill Pflugheber and Dr. Steven White, Desfontainia spinosa, 2019. From the Microcosms: Sacred Plants of the Americas collection.

Microcosms: Sacred Plants of the Americas
Confocal microscopy is a specialized optical imaging technique that provides contact-free, non-destructive measurements of three-dimensional shapes. This collection—at the juncture of art, technology, and science—features plants considered sacred by indigenous groups of the Americas.

To celebrate this year’s Earth Day, we’re sharing five openly accessible collections on JSTOR that feature the work of  important women botanists and botanical artists.

You might wonder, considering how difficult it was for women to be allowed into the sciences, how did these women achieve so much? As Matthew Willis writes in JSTOR Daily, botany started to become an acceptable focus of scientific study for upper-class women in Europe by the later part of the 1700s. He quotes the English writer Maria Edgeworth, who declared in 1810 that “Many things, which were thought to be above their comprehension, or unsuited to their sex, have now been found to be perfectly within the compass of their abilities, and peculiarly suited to their situation. Botany had become fashionable; in time it may become useful, if it be not so already.” Despite the condescension behind the opportunity, opening this door to women was a boon to science, and we are glad to be able to share their contributions with everyone.

Margaret R Dickinson. Watercolor drawing of Oyster Plant Lithospermum maritinum, now known as Oyster Plant Mertensia maritima. Not dated. From the Margaret Rebecca Dickinson Collection of Watercolors.

Minna R. Fernald, Watercolor of Cherokee Bean (Erythrina Herbacea), 1930. From the Minna R. Fernald Collection of Paintings of Florida Wildflowers.

Louis Agassiz Fuertes, bird portraitist

Louis Agassiz Fuertes with a live Snowy Owl. c. 1920. Photograph. Image and data from Louis Agassiz Fuertes Papers, Archives, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

April 22 marks the 53rd anniversary of Earth Day, the birth of the modern environmental movement. This year we honor the day and the intent with a tribute to the bird portraitist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, born in 1874, nearly 100 years prior to Earth Day, in Ithaca, New York. The artist’s father, Estevan Antonio Fuertes, was a Puerto Rico-born professor of civil engineering at Cornell University. Louis’ early passion for the meticulous study of birds, his artistic skill, and the support of his mentor Elliott Coues, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian, denoted the beginning of a life devoted to birding and the artistic record of the many feathered species. Throughout his life Fuertes participated in scientific/artististic expeditions from Alaska and Siberia, throughout the United States and Canada, to Mexico and Columbia, and finally, Ethiopia.

From a body of work that  encompassed more than a thousand field and studio sketches, the artist created finished paintings and illustrations that were included in foundational birding publications of the era: Citizen Bird, 1897; Birds of New York, 1910; National Geographic 1913-1920;  Birds of Massachusetts (1925-1929).

Thanks to an open collection from the Cornell University Library – Laboratory of Ornithology Gallery of Bird and Wildlife Art, we are able to glimpse Fuertes’ artistic awakening in studies made during his teens and early twenties and preserved in intimate sketchbooks.

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.

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.

Philippe Halsman. Philippe and Yvonne HALSMAN New Years Card… c. 1960. Photograph. © Estate of Philippe Halsman / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Magnum Photos.

Winslow Homer. Adventures of a New Year’s Eve. Negative photostat. Image and data from Smith College Museum of Art.

The New Year is an enduring phenomenon that generates celebrations of varied traditions across the world and throughout the calendar. It is our sincere wish that you may partake of these festivities in good health and with hope for the coming year. Please join us in honoring these holidays of renewal for 2023.

Peter Paul Rubens. Consequences of War. 1637-38. Oil on canvas. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

The power of art to revile and denounce war may be seen in works that cross cultures and centuries. Artstor is replete with examples from the dynastic courts of Europe, to the witnesses of the American Civil War, both World Wars, Vietnam, and beyond. The selection below, featuring monumental and intimate interpretations, provides persuasive evidence of the passion for peace among artists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Larry Towell. Canada, London. June 7, 2020. Peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd… Photograph. © Larry Towell / Magnum Photos. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SAIF, Paris.

I UNDERSTAND THAT I WILL NEVER
UNDERSTAND.
HOWEVER, I STAND.¹

Students have been “standing” for centuries, and activism is at least as old as the modern western university. From Bologna in the Middle Ages through Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, student collectives effectively determined their fees. Currently, in a world moved by activism, student uprisings are on the rise. We’re in a groundswell of youth protest, a renaissance partly defined by social media. See #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #NeverAgain, #climatechange, and many more.