Editor’s note: Student employees are a big part of The Wittliff’s success. In celebration of National Student Employee Week we want to highlight the hard work of our student employees. This is the first in a series of blog posts about how students contribute behind-the-scenes in the archives. Abigail Moon is a Wittliff digitization student …
Continue reading "Highlights from The Texas Music Collection"
Recently, Wittliff intern, Deandra Lee, curated Souls of Prom, a photo installation featuring photographs by Will van Overbeek. This new exhibition at The Wittliff’s Treasures gallery showcases six images from his 2005 Prom series. Lee’s enthusiasm comes through in her introductory curatorial statement, “I was excited to learn about a photographer who has been photographing …
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Calling all Percy Jackson fans and lovers of beautiful book illustration alike! The Wittliff Collections is proud to celebrate artist/illustrator, John Rocco, in a new exhibit, Illustrating the Odyssey: Book Art for Rick Riordan’s Mythic Worlds. On display are 17 original signed and numbered prints by Rocco that were published as cover art and illustrations …
Continue reading "Drawing Inspiration: A Q&A with artist, John Rocco"
By Katie Salzmann Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians young adult book series centers around a 12-year old dyslexic hero who discovers he is the modern-day son of a Greek god. The Lightning Thief, the first book in the series, was published in 2005 and quickly became an international best-seller, translated into dozens …
Continue reading "Percy Jackson and Mythic World-building"
By Katie Salzmann The Wittliff celebrates all forms of storytelling from the region, and we collect, preserve, and provide contextualization for important cultural objects. Within the archive of noted New Mexico historian Marc Simmons are several kachina dolls gifted to Marc from members of the Hopi tribe. This past semester, we hosted an internship that …
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The young Tejano singer onstage — clad in skintight black head-to-toe, hair dyed black in a short shiny pompadour and wearing big loop earrings — looks like she’s skipping or maybe doing a modern tango. She’s in flight, and the camera went click. In that moment, photographer Al Rendon caught the teenage Selena Quintanilla in …
Continue reading "Never-before-seen photo of Selena on display"
In honor of Pride Month 2022, I wanted to give a behind-the-scenes look at the John Rechy papers which I’m currently processing. John Rechy is a native El Pasoan who is recognized as a pioneer LGBTQ author. In 1963 he published his landmark novel City of Night, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a …
Continue reading "Rechy archive illustrates our society’s changing views on the LGTBQIA community"
You may not know his name, but you would recognize his cartoons of talking animals, talking pasta, kings, and corporate bosses. Over the course of his career, Charles Barsotti published more than 1,300 cartoons in The New Yorker and thousands more in other publications including USA TODAY, Parade, Playboy, Texas Monthly, an array of …
Continue reading "Niceday: Charles Barsotti’s Commerical Pup"
Written by Wittliff archivist, Karen Sigler, This article was originally published in the Society of Southwestern Archivist and now resides in Texas State Universities digital archives. If the world were given your personal library, what would it tell them about you? What if you were known for your political observations and didn’t mind being blunt …
Continue reading "From Politics to Poodles: A Look into Molly Ivins’ Personal Library"
The earliest known surviving set of Jerry Jeff Walker’s handwritten lyrics for “Mr. Bojangles” exist because a plucky young guitar repairman in New Jersey asked Walker to write them down so he could learn the song. Walker wasn’t yet a star in 1968. But he did have an amazing folk song on the radio in the …
Continue reading "Original ‘Mr. Bojangles’ lyrics on display at The Wittliff"