University Library
Exhibitions & News
Please join Special Collections & Archives for our in-person events this fall quarter. Programs include:
LOCATION: SC&A Reading Room and Californiana Room, 3rd floor, McHenry Library
Medieval bestiaries (Latin: liber beastiarium) are compendiums of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, and fabulous and ferocious chimeric creatures. These texts, developed from the Physiologus of Late Antiquity, were particularly popular in England and France in the 12th century. Bestiaries characteristically ascribed moral virtues and vices to the beasts on their pages, illustrating a symbolic language of animals tied to Christian thought. These works were not necessarily intended to provide factual information about natural history, but rather to imbue the curious and compelling natural world with a religious moral grounding. Some animals in bestiaries evaded such moralizing, inviting medieval readers to draw their own wide-ranging social, political, and religious connections.
UCSC Special Collections and Archives is positively replete with critters large and small, winged and maned, familiar and exotic, actual and imaginary. This exhibition celebrates a broad range of (mostly) bibliographic materials that engage with the bestiary tradition, explicitly and implicitly. We invite you to explore and discover the many articulations of animalia that populate our collections, to trace the histories these creatures contain, carry, and transmit, and to consider the following questions:
Curated by UCSC undergraduates Benyamin Alfaro, Alana Corona, Samantha Elfiqhi, Sophia Gallaga-Rabinowitz, and Prema Reyes.
LOCATION: 3rd floor hallway, McHenry Library
The exhibition highlights archival materials from the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center Records, the UCSC Poster Collection, and a number of student publications, and it's organized around the themes of cultural celebration, collective action, and education and resources. There's also an interactive space where student visitors can reflect and respond to discussion prompts about their own experiences.
LOCATION: Dead Central, on the main level of McHenry Library
Since their start in the 1960s, the American band known as the Grateful Dead showed immense capacity for creating a sense of radical welcome, connecting with fans, fellow musicians, and many others who shared their interest in the creative possibilities of experimentation and improvisation. The Thread that Runs so True draws on a variety of archival collections at UC Santa Cruz to explore the many threads running between the Grateful Dead and other artists, thinkers, and supporters who also have left behind archival traces within the archives held at UC Santa Cruz.
At UC Santa Cruz's University Library, the band’s papers keep company with musical scores of avant garde composers, recorded interviews of jazz and rock innovators, photographs and papers of Black Panther Party members, scholarly studies on sound, and even the writings of a certain gonzo journalist. A look into some of these other archives reveals the threads that run between the Grateful Dead and a diversity of artists, authors, journalists, and activists whose archives also have their homes at UC Santa Cruz today.
CART Fellow Jazmin Benton (Visual Studies) created this exhibition showcasing the many experiences of Black students at UC Santa Cruz from its establishment in 1965 through the present day. Benton spent dozens of hours leafing through archival collections including the J. Herman Blake papers, Merrill College records, and unprocessed university archives and ephemera, finding flyers, reports, photographs, and firsthand accounts of how Black students have experienced the campus and how the campus has responded (or not responded) to their needs.
In Benton's own words:
As this exhibition shows, official reports and initiatives from UCSC crop up repeatedly. Recruitment and retention efforts cycle through, failing to address the daily realities of Black life on UCSC’s campus. Black students throughout the years have faced similar barriers since the first handful of us were admitted. The narratives and documents listed here will show how students were subjected to conditions such as being the only Black student in their classes, not having the resources available to center their work around Blackness, and no recourse available when faced with racist behavior.
More than their Labor: Sites of Manong Labor and Leisure in the Pajaro ValleyCART Fellow Christina Ayson Plank (Visual Studies) is part of the project team for Watsonville is in the Heart, a public history initiative led by Dioscoro Recio, Jr. from The Tobera Project and UCSC faculty and students, including professors Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez and Steve McKay. Christina's exhibit highlights audio recordings and photographs documenting the plight, struggles, vitality, and resilience of the manong generation of Filipino migrants who first settled in the Pajaro Valley in the early twentieth century. More than their Labor offers a glimpse into the full lives of these families and identifies geographical spots they often frequented around the Pajaro Valley.
Viva los Libros: Latinx Artist Books in UCSC Special CollectionsKatie Ligmond (Visual Studies) created this digital exhibit to showcase, analyze, and compare a selection of artists' books within UCSC's Special Collections & Archives that are created by Latinx artists, authors, publishers, and communities.
The five books featured are The Book of Sand/El Libro de Arena, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que Guardé, Codex Espangliensis: from Columbus to the Border Patrol, Incantations by Mayan Women, and El Alfabeto Animado/The Lively Alphabet/Uywakunawan Qelqasqa.
seeds and whispers: a glimpse into the Karen Tei Yamashita Papers Anny L. Mogollón (Literature PhD student and Fellow in the Center for Archival Research and Training) utilized the papers of Karen Tei Yamashita (MS 465) to create an exhibit exploring "the question of how...how did the author write this? And perhaps too, how long did these stories haunt them before they were set down on paper." Yamashita is an author, playwright, and UCSC professor known for her works of Asian American literature and magic realism, including I Hotel (2010) and Tropic of Orange (1997), both of which Mogollón explores in this exhibit through early drafts, photographs, and research materials from Yamashita's papers.
Another Renga Eric Sneathen (Literature PhD student and Fellow in the Center for Archival Research and Training) wrote this essay reflecting on his time using archival materials, and the distance felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. He used Out in the Redwoods, a collection of oral histories documenting the LGBTQ experience at UC Santa Cruz from 1965-2003, as a starting point in his reflections. Sneathen also wrote a poem during his fellowship, which will be printed and bound, and available in the Special Collections reading room.
"If I had to live my life over again, I would be a botanist": John Cage's Mycology CollectionJoseph Finkel (Musicology PhD student and Fellow in the Center for Archival Research and Training) tells the story of John Cage's interest in mushrooms and its connections with his career as a composer and artist. Finkel also recounts the history of how the John Cage Mycology collection (MS 74) at UC Santa Cruz came to be part of Special Collections & Archives. He used archival materials and books from this collection, among other sources, to complete this multimedia project
Curated by Brock Stuessi (musicology graduate student and Fellow in the Center for Archival Research and Training), Echoes of Seema is a creative rearrangement of the Sara Halprin interviews of Seema Weatherwax collection. The multi-media exhibit includes original musical compositions by Brock Stuessi which he collaged with selections of audio recordings of interviews with Seema. These audio compositions are arranged alongside examples of Seema's own photographic work, as well as photos taken of Seema and her friends and family.
Michael Conlee, a senior majoring in Sociology and Art History at UCSC, has completed his HAVC service-learning practicum with the Library's Special Collections & Archives.
For his practicum, he chose to create a digital scholarship project on the theme of prison abolition and Bay Area histories of related activism. He worked with Bettina Aptheker's archive, photography by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, and other visual collections from Special Collections & Archives.
Seeds of Something DifferentCreated as a companion for Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz, edited and published by the UCSC Library's Regional History Project, this exhibit features an array of photographs, oral history clips, posters, and other archival objects that reveal the richness of UCSC's archival collections. Do you have stories and documents to add to the history? Please visit the exhibit and submit your materials for curation. Curated by Alessia Cecchet (graduate student, Film & Digital Media).
Songs of Labor & Transcendence: The Trianon Press ArchiveExplores the breadth of a renowned Paris-based press’s publications and the painstaking processes used to make them. Their books include astonishing facsimiles of work by artists such as William Blake and Marcel Duchamp, as well as books documenting prehistoric rock paintings of sub-Saharan Africa and early European art and architecture. Curated by Jessica Calvanico, Morgan Gates, Hannah Newburn, and Nicholas Whittington, 2018-2019 Fellows in the Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training.
Inquiring Into Other Minds: The Cultivation of Experimental Music in the Bay Area and BeyondChronicles the evolution of Other Minds (OM), a Bay Area music non-profit devoted to promoting new and experimental music from around the world. Using the organization’s archives, the exhibit traces early activities of co-founders Charles Amirkhanian and Jim Newman to establishment of the OM Festivals, high-profile productions, audio recording preservation efforts, and significant contributions to Pacifica Radio’s KPFA 94.1 FM. Curated by Madison Heying and Jay Arms, 2017-2018 Fellows in the Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training.
Celebrating Innovation and Public Engagement at UC Santa CruzHighlights the ways that four distinctive collections from the University Archives -- Prof. Raymond F. Dasmann’s papers as well as the records of Shakespeare Santa Cruz, the Feminist Studies Department, and the Women of Color Research Cluster -- each reveal facets of UCSC’s identity as a public university with connects within the university community, with the city of Santa Cruz and state of California, and across the globe. Curated by Alina Ivette Fernandez, Megan Martenyi, LuLing Osofsky, Alex Ullman, and Maggie Wander, 2016-2017 Fellows in the Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training.
Pictures and Progress: the Black Panther 1966-2016Featuring posters by Emory Douglas, photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, and over forty comic books, this exhibit considers the role of women in the Black Panther Party alongside portrayals of the Black Panther character and of African Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. Curated by crystal am nelson, Cathy Thomas, and Kiran Garcha, PhD students at UCSC.
Reading Nature, Observing ScienceExamines the Lick Observatory Records and the Kenneth S. Norris Papers through the historical construct of the "book of nature,” and questions how science has treated nature as a text. Curated by Danielle Crawford, Alex Moore, and Christine Turk, 2015-2016 Fellows in the Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training.
Activism in the Archives: Radical Imaginaries of the 1960s and 1970sDrawing on the papers of Ruth-Marion Baruch, John Thorne, and Karen Tei Yamashita, three key cultural figures with roots in northern California who are united by their dedication to cultural and political activism and their involvement in and/or relationship to the social justice movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Black Power, Flower Power, Red Power, and Yellow Power movements. Curated by crystal am nelson, Melissa Eriko Poulsen, and Samantha Williams, 2014-2015 Fellows in the Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training.
Chancellor Dean McHenry, the Political Mastermind behind UC Santa CruzExplores how founding UCSC Chancellor Dean McHenry's experience in California politics from the 1930s to the 1950s, including his participation in Upton Sinclair's 1934 End Poverty in California (EPIC) gubernatorial campaign and his key role in authoring the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, helped him develop the savvy and political acumen to create and lead a boldly experimental campus of the University of California.
Love on Haight: The Grateful Dead and San Francisco in 1967Virtual Tour of the Exhibit
Digital Exhibit
Examines the different modes of representation -- press, literary happenings and publications, photography, and music -- that translated and transformed the Summer of Love from a hippie movement in San Francisco to a nation-wide spectacle with the Grateful Dead as the house band. Curated by Mary deVries, Kate Dundon, Janet Young, and Elizabeth Remak-Honnef.
Put Your Gold Money Where Your Love Is, Baby: Counterculture, Capitalism, & the Grateful DeadVirtual Tour of the Exhibit
Digital Exhibit
Explores how the band invented, improvised, redefined, and pioneered business practices that revealed new ways of thinking about work, about being in business, and about the relationship between creators and their communities. It draws on the newly processed business records of the band. Curated by Jessica Pigza, Alix Norton, and Gabriel Saloman Mindel (2017-2018 Fellow in the Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training).
The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.
The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum.
Santa Cruz, CA