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.

Bethune's Art Used by the Basilica

Over the holiday season, the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis used images from the Ade Bethune Collection on the covers of flyers for Advent and Christmas services.

Click each image for more information about it.

Bethune's drawings will also appear on Basilica flyer covers during the upcoming Lent and Easter seasons. 

Ade Bethune -- comic book artist

The Ade Bethune Collection has a Google alert running that sends an email whenever Google indexes a page that either 1) links to the Ade Bethune Collection web site or 2) contains Ade Bethune's name.  This week's email included a post from the Women in Comics wiki. The post is primarily a listing of women who worked during the golden age of comics (1938-1955), and includes Ade Bethune's name. However, what is really interesting is the origin of the list--it is from the appendix of a book written by David Hajdu called The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. The book describes the rise of comic books as a medium for popular culture, and the resulting backlash against them in the late 1940s-early 1950s by church groups, civic organizations, PTAs, and McCarthy-ites in the Senate, among others.  The Appendix, in which Ade Bethune's name appears, is a list of "the artists, writers, and others who never again worked in comics after the purge of the 1950s."

One of Bethune's Treasure Chest covers

Including Ade Bethune on this list of names associated with "purged" comic books seems to imply that she was producing the kind of content that religious groups and others objected to.  In fact, Bethune's involvement with comics was as a contributor to Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact, published by George A. Pflaum from 1946 to 1972.  Treasure Chest was begun as a response to the undesirable comic books of the time. It was distributed to Catholic parochial schools throughout the U.S. and was meant to emphasize morality, faith, family, and citizenship. Treasure Chest contained primarily non-fiction stories about sports and folk heroes, saints, and other uplifting figures.

Ade Bethune drew a number of covers for Treasure Chest. Her first was for the April 5, 1949 issue and her last was for June 7, 1962. Other of Bethune's more than 20 front and back covers include those in April 1952, January 1954, February 1955, and March 1958. She also contributed stories to the comic book, including the series Jesus Spoke in Parables from 1951-1952.  Bethune also contributed to another of Pflaum's publications, Our Little Messenger.

Sketches for some of Ade Bethune's Treasure Chest covers and drawings for Our Little Messenger are in the Ade Bethune Collection.  More examples of and information about her work for children are in the exhibition "Seeing Things Through a Child's Eyes."

CLIR Grant Update

Halfway through the 2-year grant period for processing parts of the Ade Bethune Collection and making the finding aids available on the Catholic Portal, the MLIS graduate assistants are finishing work on the first two sets of materials.

Church Community Housing Corporation

The Church Community Housing Corporation (CCHC) is an organization in Newport, RI, begun in 1969 as a grassroots effort to address the need for low- and moderate-income housing, and still active today. Materials relate primarily to activities of the CCHC and its Board of Directors, but there are also materials collected by Ade Bethune based on her personal interest in issues of concern to the CCHC, such as neighborhood planning and energy efficiency. The collection is mostly made up of organizational documents, pamphlets, architectural drawings, newspaper articles, photos and slides, and supporting literature. The currently processed portion (just over 8 linear feet) includes administrative records, files for individual housing projects, and materials related to the funding, design, and construction of the first solar-powered house in Newport. The remainder—primarily records pertaining to derivative corporations of the CCHC, Bethune's own research materials, photographs, and architectural drawings—is partially processed.

Materials document the Church Community Housing Corporation's activities from its inception. The most complete documentation exists for the 1970s when Bethune was a very active member and served in various executive positions on its Board of Directors. Organizational materials of interest include a copy of the CCHC’s by-laws, correspondence with local church leaders and governmental agencies, project proposals for the purpose of securing funding, timelines and other summaries of accomplishments, lists of board members and founders, meeting minutes and agendas, and memos.

Items of particular interest uncovered in the collection also include a large number of materials relating to the Solar House. They provide an historical snapshot of solar and alternative energy issues, organizations, and supply companies in the mid-1970s. The Solar House project also reflects an intersection of the social justice and environmental movements of that decade. There are issues of "In the Heart of the City," a publication that includes artwork and writings of those helped by the emergency, temporary, and low income housing provided by one CCHC project, 50 Washington Square. And the many photographs, slides, and architectural drawings provide insight into home construction and rehabilitation in the Newport area.

Star of the Sea / Harbor House

Ade Bethune was to devote the final decade of her life to developing Harbor House, an "intentional community" for the elderly.  In 1991, she and several CCHC board members formed a non-profit corporation called Star of the Sea (SOS) to purchase unused property and the buildings on it to preserve and renovate for the project.  Following ten years of fundraising, project re-definition, and construction, Harbor House opened as a senior housing community in February 2002.  Materials cover the incorporation of Star of the Sea including corporate changes, fundraising initiatives, and design and development of Harbor House.  They include business and administrative records, correspondence, catalogs, publicity materials and architectural drawings.   Processing of the collection is complete and the finding aid is nearly done.

The collection contains correspondence with prominent individuals: William F. Buckley, Jr., Representative Patrick Kennedy (son of Ted Kennedy), Senator John Chafee and Lieutenant Governor Robert A. Weygand, as well as Catholic Church officials and other state and municipal officials on the East Coast.  There is documentation of the many foundations, state programs and other entities that support and assist community groups and corporations in completing housing and other service projects.  Materials related to the purchase, design, and renovation of the Auchincloss Estate/Cenacle-by-the-Sea Convent property are also included in the collection; they underscore the scope and nature of such a large historic preservation, restoration, and redefinition of purpose building project.