Archives, Innovation, and the Economy

Recently Kate Theimer wrote a post, Wired magazine runs on archives, for her Archives Next blog. In the post, she provides several examples from recent issues of Wired magazine of cultural products whose development was all or partially based on research done in archives. Her point: while the primary economic impact of archives is usually considered to be the spending done by visitors to archives, there is a less recognized impact. This is the benefit the economy derives from the innovation and sales of products produced with the help of archives.

Her post inspired thinking about ways in which the Ade Bethune Collection has fostered the creation of cultural products. The most obvious is the use of artwork from the Collection in published books.  Three of these come to mind in particular:

Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond

Antonin Raymond designed a church (St. Joseph the Worker, completed in 1950) for a sugar refinery compound on the island of Negros, in the Philippines. Ade Bethune was commissioned to create mosaics and paintings for the church's exterior and interior.  While working on the book, William Whitaker, one of the editors, visited the Collection, researching this project of Raymond's. He was surprised and pleased to discover a set of color slides taken of the church--the only color images he had found of the church at the time it was built, and important since parts of it have since been painted over. Two of these images are included in the Raymond book.

Information about this and others of Ade Bethune's church projects was included in an exhibition on campus, Bringing the Word of God to the People: Sacred Iconography and Church Design.

Graphic Design and Religion

This book, by Daniel Kantor, is an attempt to get churches and other religious organizations thinking about how to express themselves visually, beyond stock clip art and fonts, so that the graphic design products might be viewed themselves as sacred art.  Among the examples included in the book are 4 drawings by Ade Bethune from the Collection.

Ade Bethune is an artist whose work has stood the test of time. While her earliest work is 75 years old, it still resonates powerfully today. This is probably from two factors.

• Her strong sense of graphic design: partly from her early interest in stained glass and partly because she saw the world more as strong lines and flat colors than as shadings and nuances (she once wrote that she had a hard time with watercolor because she didn't see things that way)
• Her interest in iconography, in distilling an image down to its symbolic essences, rather than a representation of a particular person, time or place

While Ade Bethune actually published a clip art book of her own, it seems she would have applauded Kantor's efforts to start serious conversations about graphic design and religion.

[In further support of Theimer's thesis, both Whitaker and Kantor performed research in other archives while working on their books.]

Stations of Joy: Meditations on Scriptural Events

Toward the end of the 20th century, interest arose in the Catholic Church for a complement to the Stations of the Cross, a set of Stations of the Resurrection that would focus on the hopeful side of Christ's resurrection, rather than the agony of His death as predominant in the Stations of the Cross.  In 2001, the stations of the Via Lucis (or Way of the Light) were recognized by the Vatican in the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (see #153).  Shortly afterwards, the Center for Learning contacted the Collection regarding their forthcoming book, Stations of Joy, based on the Via Lucis. They wanted to use Ade Bethune's work to illustrate it, and needed assistance in identifying images that would be appropriate for each station.

First Finding Aid Entered into CLICnet

Finding aids for the Ade Bethune Collection will be placed online as part of the CLIR grant project. But other ways to improve access to the Collection are being implemented too, including the addition of records into CLICnet, the Library's catalog. Several books in the Collection have already been cataloged and added to CLICnet. Records for finding aids are being created as well. The first one, for the St. Leo Shop and St. Leo League Records, is now in CLICnet.

Bethune originally created a mail-order business because Catholic Worker readers were asking for cards using designs of hers they had seen in the newspaper. Eventually she formed the St. Leo Shop as a means of selling her religious artwork and other religious goods. It also carried publications on liturgical and social justice topics, as well as becoming the main North American outlet for Maria Montessori's books on education. The St. Leo League developed from the shop as an organization that met monthly to discuss sacred and liturgical arts. Both articles in the Shop's catalog and the League's quarterly journal, Sacred Signs, provided Ade Bethune with a forum for her ideas on Catholicism, iconography, and religious art and design.