Programs > Academic Programs

Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAVIC)

Established in 2005, The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAVIC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) seeks to provide opportunities for educators to learn about American visual culture and resources, promote the awareness of AAS collections, and stimulate research and intellectual inquiry into American visual materials. CHAVIC will accomplish these goals by offering fellowships, exhibitions, workshops and seminars, conferences, and improved access to AAS collections.

AAS has very rich collections of visual materials including maps, prints, photography, illustrated books and serials, and ephemera. These collections are described in depth on the library collections pages.

Fellowship Opportunities

Scholars interested in using AAS visual collections are encouraged to apply to the fellowship program for funding. There are currently three fellowships devoted to scholars using visual collections.

A gift from Jay Last, a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and his wife, Deborah, enables the AAS Center for Historic American Visual Culture to promote research in the Society's preeminent collection of American graphic materials. One to three-month long residential fellowships will be awarded for a variety of purposes, some augmenting current AAS fellowship offerings for research by academic scholars and by creative and performing artists preparing work for general audiences. Applicants are urged to contact the Society's curator of graphic arts, Georgia Barnhill, as soon as possible, noting that the deadline for academic fellowship applications is January 15, 2007.

Another fellowship is funded by the American Historical Print Collectors Society to support research using prints. The third fellowship, The Drawn to Art fellowship endowed by Diana Korzenik, is for scholars using prints or studying visual culture in broader terms. Scholars are eligible for other fellowships at AAS as well.

In addition to underwriting fellowships for historical research using printed visual materials, there is funding to select a group of Visual Culture Scholars for work on projects such as researching films or exhibitions, creating curriculum packages, enriching web-based resources, and documenting the natural or built environment. Awards in this category may be for projects and periods of residence that do not necessarily fall within the criteria of the fellowships.

Creative artists wishing to use historical materials as a source for their art should apply to the competition for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers.

Conferences

CHAVIC sponsors annual conferences on its own or in conjunction with other organizations. The first of these was Visualizing the Past, a one-day conference for K-12 educators, held in Worcester at AAS on Friday, October 13, 2006.

In November 2007, Fields of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of New England, 1600-1830, a conference on New England Visual and Material Culture to 1830 was co-sponsored with the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Home, School, Play, Work: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children November 14-15, 2008, in Worcester, Mass., and February 13-14, 2009, in Princeton, New Jersey

Workshops

One of the goals of the Center is to engage teachers on all levels to make images more accessible to them and their students. We will accomplish this with a series of workshops at AAS and elsewhere.

Exhibitions

AAS has no physical exhibition spaces, but has created several online exhibitions in recent years. Topics in include A Woman's Work is Never Done, Architectural Resources at the American Antiquarian Society, the David Claypoole Johnston Collection, Visions of Christmas, Portraits! Worcester Portraits in the American Antiquarian Society Collection, Making Valentines: A Tradition in America, and Summer Vacationing in New England. We will continue to add to the archived online exhibitions. We seek volunteer curators to work with the Society's staff in mounting exhibitions.

AAS has also made a commitment to collaborate with museums or special collection libraries in academic settings to use AAS materials in offsite exhibitions. A selection of prints will be available through the website of the Museum Loan Network. To pursue these possibilities, please contact Georgia B. Barnhill, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts (GBarnhill[at]mwa.org).

Access to AAS Collections

The online Catalogue of American Engravings provides detailed information about engravings published independently and as illustrations before 1821. One priority of the CHAVIC program will be to provide digital images for the materials owned by AAS in this union catalog. AAS has started to digitize the collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints. Among the genres that have been scanned to date are religious prints, city views, portraits, architectural prints, and historical prints. Access to these prints will be through the website owned by David Rumsey. He already hosts the Daniel and Jessie Lie Farber Archive of Gravestone Photographs for AAS. The Farber Collection, the William Allen Collection of Ephemera, and a collection of ephemera collected during the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 are available through the OCLC/Research Libraries Group's project, the Cultural Materials Initiative. Other collections will appear on this site in the future.

Fellowships
Conferences
Workshops
Exhibitions
Access to AAS Collections

November 1, 2008
One-day Saturday workshop for teachers

November 14-15, 2008
February 13-14, 2009
Home, School, Play, Work: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children

June 15-19, 2009
Five day workshop led by David Jaffee of the Bard Graduate Center

Past conferences:

Fields of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of New England, 1600-1830 a two-day conference co-sponsored by CHAVIC and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts was held November 9-10, 2007.

Visualizing the Past: A One-Day Conference for K-12 Educators (October 2006)

The April 2007 issue of the online journal Common-place is devoted to graphics in nineteenth-century America.