Good Evening!

It is wonderful to be back on here. I hope everyone is doing well. I actually had a tremendous week because I was able to finish my display on the WILPF and I have become working on the life of Joan Heath Fortner. I have just finished writing a little summary about her that I will include in my final display. It still requires a little bit of editing, but this is what I have so far.

Joan Heath Fortner was born in 1932 to Mr. and Mrs. Norbert A. Heath. She is an alumna of Immaculata High School (1950), Mundelein College (1954, BFA), the New York Fashion Academy (1955), and Loyola University (1979, M.A. in Education). From a young age, Fortner was extremely passionate about art and she actually became the youngest person to win the Chicago Tribune American Fashions Competition. In addition to this award, she was the 1950 recipient of the Bishop O’Brien scholarship to the Art Institute in Chicago. In 1953 she won a second scholarship to the New York Fashion Academy for a design she submitted to a contest by the Evans Fur Company.

During her lifetime, Fortner has been involved in art organizations in Chicago and suburbs for years. She is currently the president of the Des Plaines Art Guild and the executive director of Art Cubes, a nonprofit art service organization funded by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council that brings the arts to older adults. Due to the dedication to her work, Fortner has won many awards and today she is still extremely active in her community. Along with teaching art classes, she is currently working on watercolor and acrylic paintings. This exhibit will highlight various works of Fortner and the impact she has made on Art and Fashion. 

I am extremely excited to continue my work on this project because this individual is quite different from anyone I have worked on before. She is quite talented in the Arts and has this immense passion for fashion. I share this interest with Fortner in that I am a major fan of runways and clothing designs so it is quite an honor to work on this exhibit. I hope I do her justice! I will continue to work on this next week so please stated tuned!

Also, here is the link for my latest display. Please check it out.

http://www.tumblr.com/blog/wla-archives

Take care!

Good Afternoon,

This week has been going very well for the Women and Leadership Archives! We actually held an event today and the description is below. If anyone was able to attend, I hope they had a wonderful time.

The Women & Leadership Archives Speaker Series
Paradoxical Patriarchs: Reconstructing Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia
Presented by Aaron M. Brunmeir


As for my work this week, I have been spending a lot of going through correspondences and images, so the process is taking a bit longer than I had expected. Although the archives are stored at Loyola and that Chicago had its own branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, there is not a lot of information available. In my display, I will do the best that I can to include information about the programs held in Chicago. I wanted to upload some interesting photos and other information I have been looking at this week.

 

 These only represent a few of the images I have been going through during the past week. I am designing a display that will show one image and then switch off to a letter or correspondence. There is actually quite a lot of textual material that I have to work with. This organization is quite interesting in that it focuses on a wide variety of issues. If you look at the beginning images, these are all of magazines and their covers represent the different projects of the WILPF. They have focused especially on ending nuclear warfare, world hungry, sexual assault,etc. Overall, there is a theme of empowering women to enact change within their communities. I have even checked out their site this past week and they only employ women. On their international office website, their employee statement for internships reads, "*The internships are reserved for women in recognition of the fact that women remain largely excluded from positions concerned with questions of foreign policy, international relations and management, although their presence in these crucial areas is much needed. Priority is given to women between the ages of 20 and 30." 

I will keep everyone updated as I continue to work on my display. Thank you for reading!


Take care



**All information was provided by Women and Leadership Archives and  http://www.wilpfinternational.org/

Good Afternoon,

So the first thing I would love to share is the link for my newest post!

http://wla-archives.tumblr.com/

Please check it out and learn about the interesting life of Mary Agnes Curran, OSF.

As I mentioned last week, I have begun working on my newest project which focuses on the history of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). This organization has been around for almost a century and our own Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House, was instrumental in the creation of the WILPF. This group actually met in Holland for the first time, but their main offices are in New York City, New York and Geneva, Switzerland. Today, they are present in thirty-seven countries! WILPF has promoted global cooperation and women’s equality and empowerment since its founding. Unfortunately, the branch in Chicago ceased operation in 1995, but there is still a good amount of material at Piper Hall that speaks to the work they did. My job for this week and the following is to sort through their material. Thus far, I have been reading through some of the correspondence letters and what I am beginning to look at are events and various political activism papers. In total, there is a selection of newsletters, mailings, meeting minutes, Principles and Policies, promotional materials, programs and events, newspaper clippings and political activism papers. Also present are newspaper clippings and promotional materials for other women’s groups. I am extremely excited to delve into the information and create a display that highlights the contributions this organization has made. I especially do not want to forget that the WILPF focused on several prevailing political issues, including nuclear disarmament, Cold War and post-Cold War international relations, reduction of Defense spending and funding of domestic human-needs programs, peace in the Middle East, and racism. Although the information stored in Piper Hall may be more restricted since many of these problems were international, I will still dedicate a substantial amount of time to investigating any participation the Chicago branch had.


Please wait patiently as I begin to research this international organization.

Jane Addams

 Image provided by: http://www.nndb.com/people/495/000082249/jane-addams-3.jpg

Information provided by The Women and Leadership Archives.

Good Morning,

I have been finally able to upload the link for my first tumblr post, which I submitted earlier this week. As I said last week, I had been working on another exhibit and that was of Mary Agnes Curran. I should be able to upload this post in the coming week so please check it out. Now that I feel more experienced with using the archives and locating information on certain individuals, I believe that it is time to try something a bit different. The next project I am selecting will focus on the history of a very important organization called the UNIFEM Chicago Chapter. Below you will see an image of their organization and they are quite unique in the global presence they maintain. However, for this project, I will only be focusing on the group based in Chicago that was created in 1989 as a volunteer organization that worked to support projects in developing nations of the world through the affiliation with UNIFEM. In the files, there is large overview that describes what the history of this group and the different events and programs they have created. Also, there is more specific information that covers correspondence, membership informaiton, by-law revision and annual reports. My goal with this project is to spend time researching every aspect of this group with the eleven years worth of material that we have. From there, I will begin to focus on certain individuals who truly made an impact and the certain programs they created. I will also investigate the goals of these specifics programs and why certain issues were being addressed in certain areas. In boxes 4-6 in the archives, there are photographs, VHS tapes, and textile souvenirs from past meetings. I will especially take advantage of the photographs for my display, but will also gather as much information as possible from the tapes. I believe that it is essential to include as much visual primary source material as possible. It is simply a stronger and more stimulating way to present information.
My research begins next week, so I will keep everyone posted.

Have a great day!

Good Morning,

So I have been able to fix the problems with my tumblr post and it is fully operational!

Please check out the link below.


Take care


http://wla-archives.tumblr.com/post/32683361977/helen-sauer-brown