Our Digital Project with the Myrtle Jones Collection June 6, 2008
Posted by Deborah in : Digital Projects , trackbackThis spring, Gretchen and I worked on a project with the Myrtle Jones Collections. Myrtle Jones was a local artist with a very distinctive Savannah style. Special Collections holds two collections: one of her papers and one of visual materials. Our project involved rewriting the finding aid for the papers to add content and reorganize it a bit. We think this will facilitate the use of this resource for students and researchers. We added a more extensive biography and processed some materials that had been omitted from the original finding aid. While we had hoped to incorporate the visual materials into this collection as well, we decided it was not feasible at this time. Here is a link to the new finding aid, MS 002, the Myrtle Jones Papers.
We also wanted to make some of the images of her artwork and photography found in the collection of visual materials available to the SCAD community. While Myrtle Jones is well known in Savannah for her artwork, she did not consider herself a photographer. The purpose of her photography was to capture images she could later use as references for her paintings. She took extensive photos of her own paintings, people, places, and events in and around Savannah and also during her travels. She had a good eye and applied all of the elements of composition she used in painting to her photographs. Her images of Savannah are of downtown buildings, the riverfront, the historic district, and Forsyth Park. Her work documents a point in time from the 1970s through the 1990s and offers views of many important buildings prior to renovation.
Our project was a cooperative project with the Visual Resources Center. Gretchen and I selected over 200 slides from the Jones’ collection that were largely of Savannah residences and downtown buildings. With the help of Elvira Sanchez-Kisser, Gretchen scanned the slides and provided metadata for each. The slides were then uploaded into the Visual Resource Center’s Image Database. This database is available to all SCAD faculty, students, and staff from the library’s webpage. You must also be logged into MySCAD to access the SCAD Digital Image Database. When you arrive at their Image Search screen, select Architecture / Topography under Category and type in Myrtle Jones under Archive Source. You should receive 87 (or more, when we add more slides) results, many with multiple slides.
There are a number of houses, mostly from the historic district, and also a number of images of squares, the Savannah River front, the Roundhouse and railroad depot, and a number of historic buildings in the downtown area. Jones did not always convey the locations of the images on the slide. It took a great deal of detective work on Gretchen’s part to locate some of these. We hope in the near future to expand the Myrtle Jones entries in the database to include images of her artwork as well. To give you a small taste, we have included some images under exhibits.
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