Collecting area: Visual culture

The Vietnamese Students Association hosted a Vietnamese New Year celebration at the Campus Center of the University of Massachusetts Amherst on February 20, 1985. Collection contains twelve photographs and a program listing sponsors, speakers, performers, the sequence of events, descriptions of ancestor worship, the legend of the earth and the sky cakes, the menu, and some song lyrics.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

Emerging out of the College Art Association, the Art Libraries Society of North America, and other related organizations, the Visual Resources Association was established formally in 1982 to further research and education in the field of image management. A broadly multidisciplinary organization, they have played an important role in public and professional discussions of issues on intellectual property rights relating to visual materials and have been instrumental in the development of protocols for dissemination of digital materials and standards of cataloging supporting the ideal of broad public access to cultural information.

The records of the VRA chart the gradual origins and growth of a professional organization dedicating to establishing standards for visual materials and promoting access to cultural information. The records begin prior to the official establishment of VRA, when the group was a semi-formal association of interested professionals, and documents the expanding disciplinary scope of the organization, its adaptation to the evolving demands of a digital environment, and its increasing commitment to expanding public access and literacy in visual materials.

An avid botanist and naturalist, Mary (Morris) Walker was born in Stamford, Conn., on April 1, 1923, the daughter of renowed surgeon and naturalist Robert Tuttle Morris. After graduating from Vassar in 1944, Morris took her MA in Geology at the University of Michigan, marrying a fellow geologist Eugene H. Walker in 1947. Moving to Kentucky, Iowa, and Idaho before settling in Concord, Mass., in 1968, the Walkers raised three children. In Concord, Walker studied for an MA in library science at Simmons College (1971), but her work in botany and natural history became increasingly important. As a plant collector, writer, and educator, Walker traveled widely in the United States and the Caribbean, and she became a leader in organizations including the New England Wild Flower Society, the New England Botanical Club, the Thoreau Society, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. Walker died in Concord on Oct. 2, 2012.

The Walker Papers are a rich assemblage of materials documenting the life of an energetic amateur botanist. Beginning during her time as a student at Vassar, the collection offers insight into Walker’s growing interest in the natural sciences, her botanizing, and her commitments to several organizations devoted to natural history. The collection also includes a small number of letters and photographs of Walker’s father, Robert T. Morris.

Sheila S. Walker, PhD, cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, has done fieldwork, lectured, and participated in intellectual and cultural events in most of Africa and the Global African Diaspora, and her goal is to educate the public about this diaspora. Her edited book, African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, resulting from her international conference on “The African Diaspora and the Modern World,” has a companion documentary, Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora. Her also edited volume, Conocimiento desde adentro: Los afro-sudamericanos hablan de sus pueblos y sus historias/Conhecimento desde dentro: Os afro-sul-americanos falam de seus povos e suas histórias [Knowledge from the Inside: Afro-South Americans Speak of their People and their Stories] (in Spanish and Portuguese, not yet English), features chapters by Afrodescendants from all the Spanish-speaking countries in South America. She co-produced the documentary, Slave Routes: A Global Vision for the UNESCO Slave Route Project. And her most recent documentary is Familiar Faces/Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora, which was shown at the United Nations as the 2018 Black History Month program for the UN International Decade for People of African Descent. It was sent for showings at UN Information Centers in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. Dr. Walker was a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for African and African American Studies, and held an endowed chair in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the African Diaspora and the World Program at Spelman College.

The Sheila S. Walker Collection highlights how the life experiences of an African American cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, focusing on the Global African Diaspora and relationships between the Diaspora and Africa and among African Diasporan societies, allude to, exemplify, and elucidate significant issues of her era. It provides archival materials of various sorts that characterize dynamics of the period both nationally and internationally. The Collection reveals information that does not fit the usual narrative, such as that Operation Crossroads Africa, founded by an African American minister, inspired the creation of the United States Peace Corps, a U.S. government institution helmed by a relative of the then president of the nation. Also, U.S. northern, urban African Americans continued to participate in Mutual Aid Societies, as were so important historically, and sometimes presently, in much of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Born in Wisconsin but raised and educated in Kansas, Frank Waugh got his first teaching job at Oklahoma State University. He went on to teach at the University of Vermont and finally settled down in Amherst, as a professor at Massachusetts Agricultural College. While at Mass Aggie, he became well know for establishing the second landscape gardening department in the country, later the department of landscape architecture. At a time when the field of landscape architecture was still taking root, Waugh’s influence was significant in shaping the profession. His contributions include numerous articles and books, the designs he planned and implemented, and the many students he taught and mentored. A natural offshoot of his work as a landscape architect, Waugh pursued other artistic avenues as well, most notably photography and etching. He served at MAC, later Massachusetts State College, for nearly forty years before retiring in 1939.

The collection includes an extensive representation of Waugh’s published articles along with biographical materials. The centerpiece, however, is the large number of photographs, lantern slides, and etchings. While his publications reveal the mind of a pioneer in his field, together these images portray the heart and soul of Waugh as an artist.

The botanical illustrator and writer Una Foster Weatherby (1878-1957) was an early student of New England gravestones. Born in Texas in 1878, Una Leonora Foster met a young pteridologist Charles Alfred Weatherby (1875-1949) while traveling abroad in 1910, and seven years later, the couple wed. As Charles advanced in his career to a position at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard, Una became his close associate, working with in the field and as illustrator and photographer. Among the many interests the couple developed was a fascination with photographing early American gravestones, and over the last three decades of her life, Una published occasionally on the subject. She died in Cambridge on August 17, 1957, and is interred with her husband at Center Cemetery in East Hartford, Conn.

The Weatherby collection consists of a substantial typed manuscript illustrating early American gravestones, mostly from New England. Meticulously assembled, the manuscript is divided into six thematic sections based on gravestone design (death’s heads, winged cherubs, wingless cherubs, portrait stones, symbolic stones, and designs and willows). Each stone is represented by a single photograph pasted onto a page, along with a transcription of the epitaph and occasional comments on the design and date on which the information was recorded. Although most stones are from Connecticut and Massachusetts, a few stones from Virginia and South Carolina are included.

A physical education teacher from Rome, New York, Elizabeth W. Whitaker became an avid recorder of gravestone inscriptions in the 1940s. She died in 1992 at the age of 93.

The core of the Whitaker collection consists of 25 receipts and accounts relating to the early marble industry in western Massachusetts. The key figures in this series are Rufus Willson and his father-in-law, John Burghardt, who quarried stone near West Stockbridge, Mass., conveying it to Hudson, N.Y. The collection also includes a selection of photographs and postcards of gravestones, mostly in New England and New York; two folders of typed transcriptions and newspaper clippings of epitaphs from the same region, ranging in date from the early colonial period to the mid-19th century; and a price list of Barre granite from Wetmore and Morse Granite Co., 1934.

The editor, writer, and photographer Gray Williams was born in New York City in 1932, and spent most of his life in Chappaqua (Westchester County), N.Y. A 1954 graduate of Yale, Williams worked in the publishing industry for many years, including for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and since 1988, he has been a freelance writer, editor, and photographer. Long dedicated to history and historical preservation, he has served as New Castle Town Historian, chair of the New Castle Landmarks Advisory Committee, trustee of the Westchester County Historical Society, and as a member of the Property Council at the National Trust property Lyndhurst. He is the author of Picturing Our Past: National Register Sites in Westchester County (Westchester County Historical Society, 2003). A specialist in the early stone carvers of New York and Connecticut, as well as the use of grave monuments to illuminate and enrich the study of American history, art, and culture, Williams is a former trustee of the Association for Gravestone Studies and has contributed articles to its annual journal, Markers, and its Quarterly. In 2007, he was awarded the Association’s Harriette Merrifield Forbes Award for contributions to scholarship and preservation in the field.

The photographs and research materials he has contributed to the Association for Gravestone Studies are largely devoted to the subjects of three articles in the AAGS journal, Markers: “‘Md. by Thomas Gold’: The Gravestones of a New Haven Carver,” in collaboration with Meredith M. Williams, Markers V (1988); “Solomon Brewer: A Connecticut Valley Yankee in Westchester County,” Markers XI (1994); “By Their Characters You Shall Know Them: Using Styles of Lettering to Identify Gravestone Carvers,” Markers XVII (2000). The collection also includes photographs taken during AGS conferences, principally in New England, as well as a small group taken in Natchez Cemetery in Mississippi.

As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, John S. Wilson undertook of study of gravestones in New Salem, Mass. Working under George Armelagos, he receiving a BA in Anthropology with honors (1971) for his work on the “social dimension of New England mortuary art,” and returned for an MA in (1976). Wilson later worked as Regional Historic Preservation Officer and Archaeologist for the Northeast Region of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Part of the collections of the Association for Gravestone Studies, the collection includes two copies of John Wilson’s senior honors thesis, a card file associated with the thesis, and several dozen slides (both color and black and white) of New Salem headstones. Some images appear to be later prints of images taken in 1970-1971.

A photographer from Washington, D.C., Lloyd Wolf is a well known photojournalist and documentarian who often works on topics in social change. During the course of a career that began in the late 1970s, Wolf has worked on projects ranging from documenting the impact of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to Jewish mothers and fathers, Moroccan Jewry, drug rehabilitation in prison, and Black-Jewish dialog.

The 13 images in the collection are part of Wolf’s series, “Acid Reign,” a project conducted in 1989 with a sociologist from UNC-Greensboro, Rebecca Adams, exploring the lives of dedicated Deadheads. The prints were made for exhibition at the symposium, Unbroken Chain: the Grateful Dead in Music, Culture, and Memory, held at UMass Amherst in November 2007. All rights remain with Lloyd Wolf.