Presentation Launches New Digital Collection

From Top to Bottom: Ella Fitzgerald, W.E.B. DuBois, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston

January 2009--Carl Van Vechten's historic images are preserved in the Raynor Memorial Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and Archives.  Van Vechten printed his portraits on postcard stock, mailing thousands of prints to his friend Karl J. Priebe, a prominent Wisconsin artist.

A self-taught photographer, Van Vechten made hundreds of portraits of leading authors, actors, singers and musicians, and other cultural leaders, including many members of the Harlem Renaissance.  The archives staff is also digitizing Van Vechten’s postcard correspondence to Priebe.

“Carl Van Vechten’s African American Photographs and the Karl Priebe Legacy”

February 9, 2009
7:00 p.m.

 Raynor Memorial Libraries, Conference Center,

Beaumier Suites B/C

Professor Bruce Kellner, a leading scholar of the Harlem Renaissance, will introduce a new digital collection featuring over 700 photographic portraits of prominent African Americans made by the author and critic Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964).

The public program will also commemorate the centennial of the NAACP, founded on February 12, 1909.

The event is sponsored by Raynor Memorial Libraries with generous financial support from the departments of English and History.

Prof. Bruce Kellner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1930.  After service in the U.S. Navy, Kellner graduated from Colorado College in 1954 with a bachelor of arts degree.  He attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, receiving a master of fine arts degree, and began his teaching career at Coe College, then taught at Hartwick College from 1960 to 1969.  Kellner became a professor of English at Millersville University in 1969, where he remained until his retirement in 1991.  He is the author of numerous books and articles on literature, art, and the theater, including Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), a major biography, and The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (Greenwood Press, 1984).