Through a gracious contribution from the Windgate Foundation, Hamilton has embarked on an organizational project to catalog the museum’s collection.
This summer, we have brought on two individuals to direct those programs. Our first Windgate Resident Project Manager is Heather Buechler of Chicago, charged with organizing the museum’s Globe Collection of decorative and advertising blocks. No stranger to Hamilton, Heather was a “Transit Resident” last summer and became familiar with much of our collection.
Over the course of the summer, Heather has been able to sort through the entire 2000 block collection and separate them into categories as well as combining multi-colored plates to create an extremely workable body that allows us to print without searching the entire group to put together useable images. We now have shelf upon shelf of sections labeled “circus” to “grocery” that make this a most effective group of plates to print. She has also started the process of photographing each block.
Our second Wingate Resident Project Manager is Raychel Steinbach Lauen, recently returned from life in Bangkok, Thailand. As a long time volunteer, Raychel has been helping and printing for Hamilton over the last six years, sometimes giving us weeks of her time.
Raychel has begun the massive task of sorting Globe’s type collection and separating the thousands of pieces by line, size and weight. Already the collection has become far more useful and will become part of the useable library of type for both staff and visiting printers. Her task continues through September and hundreds of cases of type are both more complete and specific for all of our purposes.
We are incredibly grateful to them and the Windgate Foundation for allowing us to further our working collection and making Hamilton a better museum and an impressively useful, documented body of type and image. Work will continue next year as we move on to the great challenge of pulling the bulk of the museum’s type into a library.