David Schwittek and Sally Webster gave a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Tuesday, February 5, at 12:15 pm. Their talk is entitled “A Digital Recreation of the Lenox Library Picture Gallery: A Contribution to the Early History of Public Museums in the United States.”

The website, “The Digital Recreation of the Lenox Library Picture Gallery: A Contribution to the Early History of Public Art Galleries in the United States,” is a fully interactive, online recreation of New York’s Lenox Library Picture Gallery (1870-1911), published by the ejournal Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide. The Lenox Library Picture Gallery was located on the second floor of the Lenox Library (1870) on the Fifth Avenue site now home to the Frick Museum. The focus of this talk is two-fold: to view the website as a teaching and research tool for the study of collecting patterns and installation strategies of the post-Civil War, pre-Gilded Age period (the founding of the Lenox Library was contemporaneous with the incorporation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston), and to explore the site as a useful template for the reconstruction of other “lost” exhibitions for students of art and museum history, material and visual culture, as well as the digital humanities.

David Schwittek is an award-winning artist, designer, and filmmaker working in New York City. His current academic interests include UI/UX design, digital media and technology, documentary film, and fiber-based media. He is assistant professor of graphic design and digital media at Lehman College

Sally Webster is a much-published author in the field of American Art History including the recent essay, “The Lenox Library: New York’s Lost Treasure House,” published in the anthology, New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age (New York: Routledge Research in Art History, 2018). She was for many years a professor of art history at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.