One of the things that interested me the most while visiting Erin’s History Truck studio last week was the large map of Kensington that marked where residents’ first memory of the neighborhood took place. The idea of turning a map into sometime so alive with personal memory was really exiting for me, and made the physical space of the neighborhood seem much more alive than a traditional map might. I also appreciated the way that the map included narratives by allowing participants to tell stories about their memories of the spaces.

Narratives of spaces are also employed in Jen Gieseking’s analysis of college space in “Reconstructing Women: scaled portrayals of privilege and gender norms on campus”. Gieseking uses a similar way of thinking about people and space, although she transforms the personal stories into a larger conclusion about the way that people interact with space. Although the History Truck also deals with this interaction of people and space, Gieseking’s article addresses more directly the way that people are shaped by spaces. Although Gieseking uses direct quotes from individuals, the experiences and reactions she records are meant to be collective, and betray something about a universal experience for most Mount Holyoke students.

Both the History Truck and Gieseking’s article ask individuals personal questions about space, but the way they deal with the nature of personal narratives of space is vastly different. Although the History Truck is looking for sometime collective that many people can claim as their own, it also speaks about the specific details and uniqueness of each person’s experiences within the same larger spaces. Although Gieseking is aware of the unique situations of particular MHC students (like the quote 283 from a student who considered herself alienated by her class), she still uses their experience to make a larger point with a more universal conclusion. I realize that Gieseking had a very different purpose in writing about space that a project like the History Truck, but I still wished that Gieseking’s article had brought in the types of individual overlapping experiences that I loved about the map in Erin’s studio. Although they both serve as interesting examples of bringing together individual narratives about space, I am partial to Erin’s map that shows how varied and unique each person’s experience is.

I was incredibly struck by Dolores Hayden’s descriptions of revolutionary changes in attitudes to public art, and the way it reflects the potential of future public history projects (including the History Truck). Hayden describes how previously public art has been defined as “art that is accessible to the public” but that now it is being recategorized as “art that has public content” (Hayden, 67-68). I appreciated Hayden describing these two sometimes conflicting meanings of the word public, especially because its a word we use so often in this class but haven’t had the chance to really challenge yet. Even though Hayden is specifically describing art, her point is much broader about combining accessibility with representation. Public art and history aren’t just for the public, they’re about the public.

I’ve been thinking about public art a lot lately because of a discussion that I’ve seen online about the incredibly racist paintings in the Minnesota state capitol back home (http://www.citypages.com/arts/battle-rages-over-racist-paintings-in-the-minnesota-state-capitol-8070152, for those of you who want to know more. there’s also an online petition that has very few signatures but was written by a great organization that should get a lot more love). Until reading Hayden, I never really broke down the idea of public art in general, and her terminology and definitions are helpful for me in thinking about the various ways that the current public art in the capitol is not serving the people it’s meant to be for. Right now the art in the MN state capitol is accessible to the public, but the white supremacist content means that art isn’t really public.

The Philadelphia Public History Truck is attempting to be both accessible to the public and with public content. More than that, it is also trying to be publicly created and curated, going a step beyond even Hayden’s definition to be by the public, not just for and about them.  This seems very ambitious, but it’s also a exciting way to move forward. Can we take this attitude into discussions of things like the art in the MN state capitol? When replacing the current paintings, can the new works go even further and be not just accessible to the public, about the public, but also by the public?

Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy brought up many important points about the history of race in America and the legacy of race and slavery in institutions of higher education. Even more broadly, I thought Wilder did a good job of showing that the history of slavery isn’t tangential to American history as a whole, but an integral part of story.

One of the parts of Wilder’s book that stuck out to me was his discussion of the Philipse family, which detailed the economic and social impact of the slave trade in Colonial America. I was very familiar with this particular story because as a child I volunteered at Philipsburg Manor, the Philpse’s plantation in the Hudson Valley. I’ve never really thought that much about that experience, but it was my first introduction to public history and a place is that is trying to grapple with its legacy of slavery and violence. While I was there the site hired a new staff member to who was trying to change the main focus away from tenant farmers to slaves, although still acknowledging the role of both. Before this change, the site had mainly focused on tenant farmers, with an extreme bias toward the history of lower class white people (and about 90% of the staff and volunteers were white).  I don’t think the site has flawless presentation, but I searched a little on their website and they’ve clearly worked to highlight slavery as a primary part of their history: “At Philipsburg Manor, the story presented touches on three important subjects: slavery, commerce, and cultural diversity — concepts as relevant today as in the eighteenth century.” — Philipsburg Manor website, http://www.hudsonvalley.org/education/philipsburg-manor/telling-story

I haven’t been back in 10 years, but it seems like they are trying to bring the legacies of slavery into the present. Although institutions like Philipsburg are different from the colleges and universities whose legacies Wilder describes, it’s interesting to see how the site is trying to present slavery as a contemporary subject, and not relegated it the past.

Whenever I think about Bryn Mawr’s institutional memory, especially as it relates to trans inclusion, I’m reminded of a series of conversations I had with an alum who I shadowed as part of an externship during winter break my sophomore year. She graduated in 1997, 20 years before I will graduate, and it was fascinating to hear about her experiences and try to communicate about our similar but also incredibly different visions of Bryn Mawr.

My externship was before Bryn Mawr changed its admissions policy about accepting trans students, but trans inclusion was a major topic of conversation for current students and alums. Although the alum I talked to was supportive of Bryn Mawr accepting trans women, she was much more confused about trans men and non-binary students and their place at Bryn Mawr. I struggled trying to explain my hope of Bryn Mawr embracing greater inclusivity across the board to someone with a more narrow idea of what a women’s college should be. Although that kind of resistance exists within the current student body as well, I got the feeling that my Class of ’17 conception of what Bryn Mawr is and what it should be was vastly different from her Class of ’97 one. We shared so many of the same memories of Bryn Mawr, from our identical red lanterns to our favorite Art History professors, but we had different basic definitions of who should have access to Bryn Mawr.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been thinking a lot about May Day gifts and passing down Bryn Mawr’s heritage. What does it mean for documenting Bryn Mawr history that many of us personally have pieces of Bryn Mawr life that have been handed down for years? I have a few items that were originally from the 90s and early 00s, which I never thought of as very valuable. I only recently remembered them because I have some hell schedules from 10-15 years ago that are interesting to consider at as the school reevaluates the tradition. Since there are no records of May Day gifts, we have no idea of what artifacts are being passed down. I’m sure they would form a very different story about Bryn Mawr history than the one found in the official college archives.

Rodney G.S. Carter’s piece Of Things Said and Unsaid brought to mind a discussion I had had in an art history class this week about how our analysis of the past is shaped by our access to written materials. We were discussing the potential meanings behind a medieval painting of Mary, and how the image may have held a myriad of meanings but the only ones we could properly analyze were those that were supported by theological texts of the era. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of contemporaries were illiterate and more likely to learn their faith through images, not theological texts. The painting may have been read in many different ways, but the only one we know about is the one that comes from an institutional perspective. Although archives are made up of both words and images, I can’t help but feel that the strong preference for archiving the written word is already privileging certain people and types of material culture over others.

Carter ends his piece with a call to action for further archiving, especially on the part of marginalized groups. But I wonder if the problem runs deeper than that. Yes, literacy rates in much of the world are higher than they used to be. But we still can’t account for all the things left unsaid and unwritten. Even Springer in Radical Archives is looking at groups who created material that is in the right form to be archived using traditional methods. We can’t go back in time and ask medieval peasants what they thought of a painting in a church, but we also aren’t going out and collecting the thoughts of every person who sees a work of art now and putting it in an archive. It’s easy to look at newspaper archives and find art critics writing about exhibits, but much harder to find a record of someone who wandered in off the street, or someone who couldn’t afford to pay the admission price in the first place. Nobody asks what people without power or influence thought, so nobody writes it down, and consequently there’s nothing to archive. Our way of thinking about recording information still prioritizes certain types of material, especially things that have been written and published. Carter suggests that we “attempt to understand the contexts that gave rise to the silences” (230), but he uses the past tense as if we aren’t still creating silences and leaving blank spaces in the history we record today.