Topic: Women's History Resources in Archives & Special Collections

Over three hundred audio recordings associated with a University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts course, "Black Experience in the Arts," which showcased the power of art as a mechanism for social change and racial expression. The recordings document the contributions of black artists of the time period, including women poets, musicians, actors, and artists.

Bonnie Christensen, born in 1951 in Saranac Lake, New York, is a children's book author and illustrator as well as an artist. The collection contains the original illustrations, woodcut blocks, research materials, and manuscript materials of Bonnie Christensen.

Developed in the late 1990s and maintained but not updated since 2000, the Connecticut Artists Project is an informational database on visual artists who have lived or worked in Connecticut from early times through 2000.

The collection contains audio cassettes, photographs, correspondence, ephemera, notes, publications, memorials pertaining to the artist Cynthia Snow. Most of the material relates to her memorial celebrations, and includes several paintings.

Eleanor Estes (1906-1988) was the author and illustrator of a number of children's books over her long career. Born in West Haven, Connecticut, Estes worked as a librarian at the New Haven Public Library before winning a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where she met her husband. She worked as a children's librarian for the New York Public Library until her first book was published in 1941. That book, The Moffats, set in fictional
Cranbury, Connecticut, was based on Estes' own childhood in West Haven. She was the recipient of the Newbury Medal in 1952 for Ginger Pye. The Eleanor Estes papers contains professional and personal correspondence, speeches, essays, drafts and proofs, photographs and ephemera related to Estes long career as a children's book author and illustrator.

The papers of painter, portrait artist, and illustrator Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941) include correspondence, diaries, biographical information collected on the Emmet family, newspaper clippings related to Rand's work and her family (1906-1954), photographs of Ellen Emmet Rand's portraits (1904-1930), exhibition catalogues, and Rand's medals for submitted work.

Esphyr Slobodkina was born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia on September 22, 1908. In 1917, in the midst of the Russian Revolution, Slobodkina and her family migrated to Harbin, Manchuria, where she grew up studying art and architecture. In 1929 she moved once again with her family, this time to the United States. Slobodkina began to write and illustrate children's books in the 1930s, as a way to supplement her wages during the Great Depression, eventually publishing 24 works. In addition to her children's books, she painted throughout her life creating abstract works of art. Her art, and her literary works, have been featured in exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Smithsonian, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The collection consists of notes, administrative records, correspondence, realia, news clippings, manuscripts, legal records, fliers, sketches, galley proofs, financial records, maps, and photographs. Included in the collection are materials related to many of her published books, including titles such as, The Sophisticates, Caps for Sale, Trial and Errors, The Little Dingy, The Fame, the Breeze and the Shadow, The Little Farmer, and The Little Fireman.

Zines, comic books, ephemera and textiles by punk artist, illustrator, and music and spoken-word performer Fly, as well as titles from her personal collection.

Ginnie Hofmann grew up in Ohio during the Great Depression. She decided early on to pursue a career as an artist and after graduating from high school spent four years at art school in Cincinnati training for her life's work. After graduating from art school in
1942 she worked briefly for Columbia Records in Bridgeport as an artist. She later married and began looking for work in New York and worked for a time with Seventeen, Fascination, and Madamoiselle. The work for which she would become best known, The Betsy McCall Paper Doll collection, began in 1958. Her association with the McCall company ended in in 1986 when the company decided to replace the paper doll pages in the magazine with puzzle pages. The collection contains a Betsy McCall doll book (1971), a Betsy McCall coloring book (1971), as well as some original art.

The collection contains the correspondence, posters, sketches, books, publications, and illustrations of folk artist Kathy Jakobsen.