![]() ![]() She loved the idea of using my recent acquisition. ![]() Director Salli Lovelarkin asked if I would curate the inaugural show, launching the space simultaneously with a performance by the May Festival Chorus, the oldest choir and choral festival in the western hemisphere, originating in 1873. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts. The woman selling items was tired because it was getting near dinner time, and she told me to take everything for free.Ī few years later, a new exhibition space was about to open in the heart of downtown Cincinnati in the restaurant and theater district, the Alice F. I pulled a few of these aside, wanting to show them to my classes so that students could hold examples of material culture in their hands and viscerally understand what black artists had to combat on a daily basis. At a garage sale one afternoon in northern Kentucky, I found many boxes of old sheet music, some of it with racist imagery. The next prompt came in the fall of 1992, after I began teaching at the university. I was intrigued by this world of illustration, which was then relatively unexamined. There I met another fellow, Saul Zalesch, who collected sheet music for their covers. The first was while I was a predoctoral fellow in Washington, DC, at the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), during 19. My work on illustrated sheet music diverges from my primary research area on African American art. Although I earned modest honoraria for the gallery exhibition and several of the library talks, most of this work received no monetary compensation. With a sincere interest in bridging “gown and town” through community engagement, I undertook these projects for a host of reasons: job expectations (a Research I institution, the University of Cincinnati (UC) expects faculty to engage with the community), intellectual stimulation, the desire to complete relatively short-term projects, the joy of original research, the satisfaction of detective work, making a difference outside of the classroom, and personal fulfillment. It is a form of democratic activism that engages people in conversation about the intersections among imagery, music, social and political changes, and personal memories. My work curating exhibitions of illustrated sheet music falls in the middle, serving the public yet not collaborating with it, while transforming lives in activist ways. In her introduction, Laura Holzman describes a spectrum of public scholarship, from traditional art historical scholarship to democratically engaged practices and products. Public Engagement with Images of Ethnicity, Gender, Place, Race, and War in Illustrated Sheet Music ![]()
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