Contributed by Jahna Auerbach, Assistant Archivist for the John Rhoden papers
Hello! This is Jahna Auerbach and I am so excited to be back working on the Rhoden project for the first time since we took a pause in March. In my first week back, I have had great luck in identifying more artists that John Rhoden met during his time in the Soviet Union.
One of the biggest breakthroughs was discovering the William A. Smith Archive in the National Gallery of Art (NGA) Image Collections. William Arthur Smith was an American photographer, illustrator, and painter, who traveled with John Rhoden in the Soviet Union under the auspices of the United States Department of State.
John’s travel slides include many images of himself and William A. Smith. The John Rhoden papers contain no correspondence between the two men, but it is evident in the images we have that the two were close.
The subjects of the images digitized by NGA have all been identified and some of the images that William A. Smith captured mirror the ones in the Rhoden papers. Because of this correlation, we were able to identify artists as Stojan Batic, Lazar Vujaklija, and Martiros Saryan, as well as several works of art in just one day.
Identifying people and places has become one of my favorite parts of being an archivist. I always try to carve out some time to research the unknown in the Rhoden papers. This week’s discovery has lead me to ask, what else can we find in archives? For example, could there be images of John Rhoden that have not been digitized in the William A. Smith Archive at NGA? I also discovered that William Arthur Smith has a large archival collection at the Hobart and William Smith College Archives, which I hope to explore as well.
These discoveries are one of the many reasons it is so important to digitize archival collections and create finding aids and inventories.
This project, Rediscovering John W. Rhoden: Processing, Cataloging, Rehousing, and Digitizing the John W. Rhoden papers, is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.
ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
