Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Exhibition Services staff members remove the ‘Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia’ display banner after the close of the exhibition. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.

Preparator Wyndell Faulk and Chief Preparator John Wright carefully remove from display Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. Photo by Pete Smith.

The Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin interviewed University President William Powers Jr. at the Ransom Center about the school’s Powers Graduate Fellowship Program. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.

Photo by Pete Smith.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) is on display for only three more days at the Harry Ransom Center. This Sunday is the last day visitors can view the work before it travels to its next destination.

The painting, one of the Ransom Center’s most famous and frequently borrowed art works, has been on almost continuous loan since 1990. During that time, the painting has been featured in exhibitions in more than 25 museums in the United States and around the world.

You can view an interactive map that illustrates the travels of Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.

Later this year, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird will be on view in a three-venue exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Activities of…

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A bearded and robed figure, whip in hand, chases well-healed bankers and brokers in top hats down Wall Street. Their retreat, a frenzied stampede of cash, coins and streaming ticker tape, is followed by ranks of protestors carrying signs and banners reading, “Democracy,” “Racial Equality,” “Social Security,” and “Right to Work.” Elizabeth Olds’ lithographic print, 1939 AD, a modern reinterpretation of a famous biblical story, resonates today as it did almost three-quarters of a century ago during the Great Depression when millions of American workers struggled to make ends meet in a decaying economy. Olds’s satirical print, along with 11 other lithographs of the same time period (1934–1939), were reissued in 1986 as A Celebratory Portfolio to commemorate the artist’s 90th birthday. Her portfolio, a potent reminder of a dark period in America’s economic history, serves as a graphic example and tribute to the innovative arts programs established by President Roosevelt’s New Deal government under which Olds created and produced her prints.

Born in Minneapolis in 1896, Elizabeth Olds studied architecture at the University of Minnesota beginning in 1916 and later attended the Minneapolis School of Arts on scholarship. In 1921, she was awarded her second scholarship to attend the progressive Art Students’ League where she studied under painter George Luks, who became her mentor. Guided by Luks, Olds honed her drawing skills while on sketching trips throughout New York City’s ethnic neighborhoods. She also learned how to execute a portrait on these trips in the direct, vigorous style of the Ashcan School of which Luks was a member. In 1925, Olds traveled to Europe with financial assistance from friends, and in 1926, she became the first woman to secure a Guggenheim Traveling Fellowship, which enabled her to continue her studies in Europe until 1929.

An internship at a commercial printing company in the early 1930s—a time of transition for the artist—gave Olds the opportunity to become proficient in lithography. Inspired also by the Mexican muralists of the time, particularly José Clemente Orozco, Olds aligned her subject matter and style to make art that she considered “vital” and purposeful. In an interview with the Omaha World Tribune in 1935, Olds explained her artistic intentions:

Thanks to the support of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), established in 1935 and its special programs such as the Federal Arts Program and the Public Works of Art Program, Olds maintained steady employment and utilized her printmaking skills to produce a number of deeply moving images, many of which are included in A Celebratory Portfolio. Olds focused primarily on the labor movement of the time period. Meat processing workers, coal miners, and steel workers were some of her favorite subjects as their working class ranks harbored many of the unemployed. Giving a gentle nod to the art of caricature, other more humorous works in the portfolio comment on the various social stereotypes found in Sidewalk Engineers, The Nun’s Union Demands Shorter Hours for Prayer, and the regimented ranks of the White Collar Boys. In A Sacred Profession is Open to College Graduates, Olds, a college graduate, fully sympathizes with the fears and trepidations of all college students confronting a weak job market.

Elizabeth Olds maintained a productive career throughout her long life before her death in 1991. Her pioneering work in printmaking showed how commercial lithography and silkscreen printing had the potential to become fine art forms. Over time, her interests, always socially conscious, focused more and more on the natural world as she moved from representation to abstraction and back again as easily as she could ride a horse (while studying in Europe she was a trick bareback rider in a Parisian circus). Olds has been the subject of critical essays on modern art and the women’s movement in art. Her work is found in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; The Museum of Modern Art; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Minneapolis Museum of Arts; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and the Ransom Center.

1939 A.D. 1939. 11 5/8” x 15 ¾”

Arthur Conan Doyle's Ouija board. Photo by Pete Smith.

Bethany Johnsen is an undergraduate intern at the Ransom Center who has been working with Cline Curator of Literature Molly Schwartzburg to gather materials for students for a visit on Halloween.

For the students in University of Texas at Austin English Professor Janine Barchas’s freshman honors seminar, a Ransom Center visit on October 31 will bring more than the usual bag of treats: a Halloween-themed presentation introducing students to the Center’s resources.

I assisted Ransom Center Cline Curator of Literature Molly Schwartzburg in putting together the presentation, and this process revealed the provocative connections that such a subject affords, and will, we hope, suggest to these students ways they might use the collections over…

Busts on the north end of the Ransom Center's lobby. Photo by Eric Beggs.

It’s hard enough to do archival research without the subjects themselves peering over your shoulder. But if you visit the Ransom Center Reading Room to pore over the letters, manuscripts, and papers of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Robert De Niro, or Edgar Allan Poe, they are all there to supervise your research—or at least their busts are.

Fourteen busts perched in the lobby greet Ransom Center visitors, and 29 busts keep an eye on the Reading Room. Many of the sculptures—such as Walt Whitman, Tom Stoppard, and Ezra Pound—represent those whose collections are housed at the Ransom Center. Figures whose archives are not at the Ransom…

Al Hirschfeld's 1954 letter to Edward Weeks. © Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York. www.alhirschfeld.com.

John Steinbeck stamped his letters with a winged pig, Muhammad Ali’s letterhead alludes to his catchphrase “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” and Al Hirschfeld signed his letters with a spiral-eyed self-portrait. Read about what we can learn from these and other illustrated letters found across the Ransom Center’s collections.

Exhibition Conservator and Head of Exhibition Services Ken Grant and Preparator Wyndell Faulk inspect Frida Kahlo's 'Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird' in 2009.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s Self–portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) has returned to the Ransom Center and is on display in the lobby beginning today, which is Kahlo’s 104^th birthday, and runs through January 8, 2012. The painting, one of the Ransom Center’s most famous and frequently borrowed art works, has been on almost continuous loan since 1990. During that time, the painting has been featured in exhibitions in more than 25 museums in the United States and around the world.

The painting was most recently on loan as part of a Kahlo retrospective tour with stops at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin,…

Plaster maquette of W. E. B. DuBois by Walker Hancock. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

A plaster maquette of a bust of W. E. B. DuBois has been donated to the Harry Ransom Center. The bust, which was sculpted by Walker Hancock (1901–1998), documents a step in the creative process for the final marble sculpture, which resides in Memorial Hall at Harvard University.

A plaster maquette is a model for a finished sculpture that enables the artist to visualize and test shapes and ideas before producing a full-scale sculpture. (It’s analogous to a cartoon or sketch for a painter.)

The DuBois bust was commissioned in 1993 by the Harvard University president and fellows and the Department of Afro-American studies. DuBois was the co-founder of…

Plantin Polyglot Bible, 1569-1573.

A completely revised Guide to the Collections has appeared on the Center’s website, superseding one based largely on the published edition of 2003 (now out of print). The Guide does not replace standard cataloging but supplements it, emphasizing topical access across the collections.

Changes in scholarship since the first edition of the Guide was published in 1990 are reflected in the new version. For example, there wasn’t a Gay and Lesbian chapter in the 1990 guide; one was added in 2003, and in 2010 it has expanded into a long section on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer (LGBTQ) studies. The history of the book was just finding its way as a discipline back in 1990 (when it…

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The Stanley Burns tintype collection is a remarkable and rare assemblage of unusually large, hand-colored, American tintypes in period frames. With more than 130 items, this is one of the largest collections of its kind.

Portraiture in America has a long tradition. In the colonial era, painted portraits provided a historical record of prominent figures, while miniatures and silhouettes provided more intimate records of family members. As the middle classes prospered in the early nineteenth century, painted portraiture flourished. With the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, the face of portraiture started to change. The daguerreotype required one- to three-minute exposures, which were hard for people to hold, but as other photographic mediums were developed, such as ambrotypes and tintypes, photography began to replace painting as the standard technique for portraits.

Tintypes, like daguerreotypes, are one-of-a-kind photographs. There is no negative, as the image is exposed directly onto the substrate. The word “tintype” is, in fact, a misnomer, as iron, not tin, was used as the substrate. The tintype process was faster, cheaper, and produced a more accurate depiction than a painting, which led to its rise in popularity, especially with the middle and working classes. The necessary equipment and chemistry were portable and thus allowed photographers to travel, providing access to people in rural areas and to Civil War soldiers.

The Burns collection consists almost entirely of portraits, many of which are of individuals, including paired sets of husbands and wives. Additionally there are family portraits, some of which are “composite” images where the photographer reproduced earlier portraits of individuals into one group portrait, a method often used to include deceased family members. There are also many portraits of children, including post-mortem photographs of infants. Portraits of African-Americans and people in trade uniforms exemplify how photography helped democratize art by making it accessible to lower and working class citizens.

The tintypes in this collection are all painted, either with oil paints or watercolor. Some are painted heavily in a folk-art style while others have only minimal colorization. Tintypes were not usually painted, but doing so placed them within the tradition of painted portraiture and thus closer to being fine art. Painting them also made up for the poor contrast of tintypes and could make them appear more life-like. Most commonly, tintypes measured about two by three inches and were housed in paper display folders, but the ones in this collection measure six by eight inches or larger and are displayed in elaborate frames, another practice that helped raise the status of the photograph to fine art.

The frames in the collection are of equal importance to the photographs, and they represent a variety of styles—from the plain to the elaborate—and date from 1840 to 1910. Renaissance revival and federal revival styles are simple and elegant; rococo revival frames include scrollwork and flower motifs. Many frames in the collection are Eastlake style, named for the nineteenth-century British architect and tastemaker Charles Eastlake. These consist of ebonized or marbleized wood with incised geometric patterns. Aesthetic style frames, also well represented in this collection, are distinguished by the clarity of their molded designs with motifs inspired by nature. The collection also includes frames in tramp art and rustic styles, which are more simply decorated, carved-wood designs. The range of styles from simple wood constructions to elaborate gilt moldings reveal the social status of each photograph and, by extension, the subjects.

Sisters with Blond Hair. Unidentified photographer. Ca. 1875. Oil on tintype. Eastlake style frame.