Mystery Photo: Faculty Shows

We’ve never made the best use of our slide collection. It has always been hard to access, and the slides were never completely cross referenced into our subject files. We also worried, from time to time, that we were losing the images. Most of our slides were in potentially-acidic cardboard mounts, and even under ideal conditions older slide film begins to discolor after only a couple of decades.

So recently our archivist, Muriel Olsson, went through all of our slides (1000+!) and selected those worth preserving. I then scanned them and sent the files to a photo finishing company to have prints made. Our photograph curator Beth Smith has now added these to our meticulously-catalogued photograph collection.

We found lots of wonderful pictures while we were squinting through the slide viewer, including the slide of an old photograph of the Protection Engine Company that we used in the March 19th post.

But none were quite as fabulous as the 31 slides showing men and women in fancy dress. Judy Wemer Chamberlain was able to identify some of the teachers and remembered seeing these faculty shows when she was in school. The slides are not dated, but we think they might have been taken in the late ’50s or early ‘60s. We don’t know how many different shows are represented in the collection, or the span of years. We’re looking for identifications, but we’d also like to hear more about these shows. Does anyone know the dates or what the shows were called? What were they like? How many of the faculty participated? We’d love to know!