21st-Century Abe
Nicholas Schonberger, Rosenbach Museum and Library, USA
http://www.21stcenturyabe.org
21st-Century Abe (21stcenturyabe.org) is an innovative, interactive website celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s legacy for people in their teens and twenties and rooted in the Rosenbach Museum & Library’s collections of rare and important Lincoln materials. The project grew out of an awareness that there is intense interest in Lincoln among Generation Net, as the abundance of Lincoln-themed YouTube videos and MySpace pages will attest, but that he is almost exclusively represented and discussed in a mythical and clichéd way. The goal of Twenty-First Century Abe is to engage this audience in exploring a nuanced and complex view of Lincoln and to create a community of dialogue (both textual and artistic) around contemporary issues that grow out an understanding of Lincoln’s historical materials. The organizing themes of the project include Lincoln’s views on race, his patterns of thought and rhetoric, and his role as a celebrity, both in his day and ours.
The full website will run February-August 2009 and revolves around a selection of thirty documents from the Rosenbach collection, ranging from a Lincoln letter about his family history to the manuscript of the Baltimore Address. Visitors to the site are able to explore these documents digitally and access scholarly interpretations by Dr. Wilson and artistic interpretations by nationally-known contemporary artists. Visual artist Maira Kalman (whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on the cover of the New Yorker) offers a panel story about finding Lincoln at the Rosenbach and in her own life; composer and rock musician Bryce Dessner (of The National) has created “The Lincoln Shuffle,” a collection of downloadable and re-mixable songs inspired by Lincoln and 19th-cneutry music; media artists ARCHIVE (whose Art After Death appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial) present a wide ranging series of Webisodes under the title “One Lincoln After Another,” and the comedic theater company 1812 Productions is currently working on producing a series of radio plays. The work of our interpretive team inspires website visitors to imagine, design, and share their own interpretations, creating a community of dialogue (both textual and artistic) around contemporary issues that grow out an understanding of Lincoln’s historical materials.
Demonstrating the functionality and interactivity of 21stcenturyabe.org includes discussion of the specific curatorial challenges associated with a robust and complex web project.
Demonstration: Demonstrations 1 [Close Up]
Keywords: abraham lincoln, rosenbach museum, 21st-century, generation net, history, art
