Abuela’s House

National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture

September 6, 2025 through July 18, 2026

Abuela’s House transcends the traditional notion of an exhibition; it is a love letter to identity, cultural inheritance, craftsmanship, and home. This exhibition is an intimate exploration of the enduring creative and personal influence of the artist’s maternal great-grandmother, and a celebration of the magic of time, wisdom, and love channeled by a single person. Each of the seventeen scenes realized by Destyni “Desi” Swoope’s own hands are a true mix of paint, found objects, and an eclectic collection of fabric.  Abuela’s House encourages us to understand that the colors of our lives come directly from the seeds our ancestors sowed for us, and we now have the opportunity to bloom freely, wildly, and on our own terms. Ultimately, Desi patchworks the spirit of the Puerto Rican/Caribbean women who have carried on for generations, whose traditions and beliefs inspired her to dream for them and for herself. Curated by Zee Lopez Del Carmen.

Information for Your Visit:

National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture

3015 W Division St.

Chicago, IL 60622

Tuesdays through Thursdays: 10 am – 5 pm; Saturday: 10 am – 2 pm; Closed on Sundays and Mondays

Free and open to all

https://nmprac.org/exhibitions/abuelas-house/

For more information, contact: Ignaik Cruz-Perez, Lead Docent; ignaikcp@nmprac.org

Are you launching a new exhibit?

CAA members are welcome to share news of exhibits on view at their institutions. Please tell us more on this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesaDrz5BstR9CMUtLNlVVl-uiwUSr_sbE6L1TK7BY2ehbV1w/viewform

Welcome to Project of Record, a spotlight on cool archival projects CAA members are working on! Each installment of this series will feature a member and a notable project they think may be of interest to our wider membership.

We hope Project of Record will strengthen the sense of community across CAA and help foster connections between members that may be doing similar work, facing common challenges, or celebrating successful projects.

Do YOU have a project you’d like to share in Project of Record? Contact Elizabeth Buchanan (s.elizabeth.buchanan@gmail.com).

In this installment, Cheryl Ziegler discusses her work to digitize the Union League Club Newsletter.

Your name, organization, and position:

Cheryl Ziegler, archivist (part time) of the Union League Club of Chicago.

Summarize the archives project you’d like to highlight:

Understanding the project requires a little history. The Union League Club of Chicago was founded in 1879, chiefly as a social, civic leadership and philanthropic organization. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with labor unions, but was derived from the American Civil War era Union League of America. You name a historical event in Chicago or in Illinois, chances are likely that club members were involved - for example, the Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Crime Commission, the Committee on Race Relations after the Red Summer, these all had Union Club members as leaders. Around 1919 or 1920, the club founded a Boy’s Club for “wayward youths” to learn job skills. One of the professions they could study was printing in the Boy’s Club print shop and to get them started, the club began soliciting its members to write the Union League Club Newsletter.

The newsletter ran off and on for years, with articles about the club, local news, national news, all sorts of things. We have these physical newsletters from 1920 to the current time. I’ve wanted for a long time to get them digitized and get them up on the Chicago Collections Consortium portal. This is probably my biggest digitization project to date, and it’s not finished yet.

How long has the project taken so far, from conception to present? What were your goals and have they changed over time? How much work do you have left?

It was an annual goal for 2023 to get started on the project, but it wasn’t until December of 2023 that I started having conversations with IT and pulling together specific, nitty-gritty information that I would need in our proposal like technical specifications, how we were going to handle storage and make the files accessible. Coming up with some kind of naming convention was challenging!

By the start of 2024, I started the actual prep and inventory, which entailed pulling a physical copy of each newsletter and doing pagination, which was the nightmare of this whole thing! Remember the Boy’s Club print shop, where the wayward youth were learning their craft? They did a great job, but the page numbers were wonky. Sometimes they forgot to change the volume number. So I started an Excel spreadsheet inventory to track volumes and page numbers, and it evolved to include information on size format (the physical size of the newsletters changed over time), physical condition, etcetera. The prep and inventory went on between October to January of 2025, while in the meantime my funding proposal had to go to three committees of the Club to get permission to the digitization contract out to bid. By February we had a contract, and the actual digitization started in April. We’ve hit a few bumps in the road, but we’re maybe about halfway through. We’re looking at October or November 2025 completion.

What were the biggest challenges in this project? What resources did you consult? Did you apply for/receive outside funding?

The inventory was huge. One logistical thing that came up right away was that there are gaps in our series of individual newsletters. Fortunately they had a habit of gathering up a year of newsletters and binding them, so there are bound books of many of the missing years but in some cases I’ve had to backtrack on those missing ones and unbind books to get a clear scan. There’s also a continuing challenge to making the documents accessible to the public, because the Chicago Collections can’t upload PDFs right now. I would have to upload a surrogate with a PDF link back to our internal storage, and I can’t allow unlimited access to the Club’s system. That’s one of those details that still needs to be figured out. Uploading a flat format would be much easier, but the OCR’d pdfs will be a GAME CHANGER for research uses of this collection. I have a really high level inventory that someone made years ago with headlines for the biggest articles, but making them available as searchable text will really expand the usability of the collection.

We’re a 501 c7, not a C3, so I can’t go after most of the grants or money that is out there and available for this kind of work. I put a lot of my questions out on the CAA Listserv, which I love. People are so generous with their advice, so I did a lot of talking with people that I know and also with people that I didn’t know until I reached out to them. There’s a lot of information out there on digitization - the LoC, NARA, SAA - but honestly I think CAA was one of the biggest resources when it came down to figuring out what the norm was.

What’s a fun or interesting thing you want to tell us that has happened in the course of this project?

When I was doing the inventory, I would start reading the articles and get caught up! There are things like…Senator Dick Durbin brought Barack Obama here for lunch before he had announced his candidacy. So there’s a little newsletter article that talks about Durbin having lunch with Obama and saying, “You know what you really should do is run for president.”

What advice would you give to someone starting on a similar project? Can CAA members contact you about similar projects?

Patience. Document, document, document - write EVERYTHING down. Before you actually launch into the project make sure that you’ve at least tried to cover your bases with planning. You can’t control everything. Stuff is going to happen. But if you’ve played out all the scenarios in your mind or on paper, then when the surprises happen it isn’t tragic - you can punt! I’m happy to talk, reach out to to me at cziegler@ulcc.org.

On Saturday, February 7th, the Archives and Archivists of Color and the Curation & Exhibitions Interest Groups met up at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture for a tour of their current exhibition Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined led by Curator Dr. Kiersten Neumann followed by a behind the scenes tour of their institutional archive led by Archivist/Digital Collections Manager Allie Scholten.

The exhibition marks 100 years since ISAC’s first major archaeological expedition (1925–1939), which revealed layers of palatial complexes, fortifications, and elite material culture. At the crossroads of West Asia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, Megiddo endured for millennia as a nexus of power and cultural exchange. The exhibition examines not only what was unearthed but also what was imagined: a site transformed into a stage for institutional ambition, philanthropic vision, and global storytelling and is on view until March 15^th.

Moderators Kheir Fakhreldin and Patti Gibbons organized the event and a total of twenty-eight people attended.

Media Revolutions Then and Now: Martin Luther and the Making of Modern Communication

University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center Gallery, 1^st Floor
January 5 through April 10, 2026

Media Revolutions Then and Now explores how the Protestant Reformation and innovations in printing technology coincided to catalyze a sweeping revolution that paved the way for media culture as we know it today. The exhibition upends traditional narratives that center on printing technology as the driving force of the Reformation and instead shows how essential religious thought and practice were for the emergence and success of modern media. The exhibition holds up a mirror to our contemporary media landscape, illuminating what the early modern reformation of media can teach us about today’s media culture and hint at what it might look like in the future.

Digital exhibit

Information for Your Visit:
University of Chicago Regenstein Library
1100 E. 57^th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Special Collections (1^st floor): Weekdays 9am-4:45 pm

Free and open to all

For more information, contact: Patti Gibbons, pgibbons@uchicago.edu

Are you launching a new exhibit?
CAA members are welcome to share news of exhibits on view at their institutions. Please tell us more on this form.

Thank you so much to all our members and guests that joined us for the 2025 CAA Holiday Party! We had just over 50 people eating, drinking, and making merry at Exchequer’s Club X Speakeasy, which was a wonderful new space to celebrate the holidays. Many thanks to the Programming Committee for their organizational efforts, especially Heather McGowan and Kristin MacDonough for coordinating our raffle prizes. Thanks to the Steering Committee for their sponsorship, and a huge thank you to all our members that were able to donate an extra ticket so that more of us could enjoy the event. Here are some images from the event – if you have more to share, please email info@chicagoarchivists.org.

Happy holidays!

Images courtesy of Cheryl Ziegler

We had over 100 tickets claimed for the Friday, November 21st performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, performing Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Haydn’s Symphony No. 93, and Mozart’s Requiem, conducted by Manfred Honeck. Many thanks to our host, CAA member Frank Villella, for arranging the evening. Below are some images submitted by CAA members enjoying the music.

CAA member Sophie Penniman (right) and two friends

CAA member Gretchen Neidhardt (left) and friend

On November 6, 2025, the Curation & Exhibitions Interest Group visited the University of Chicago Library’s Charting Imaginary Worlds: Why Fantasy and Games are Inseparable and participated in a digital preservation-themed tabletop game event.

The exhibition examines the reciprocal relationship between the fantasy genre and role playing games and is part of UChicago Library’s wider Year of Games initiative to celebrate all forms of games throughout this academic year. Attendees toured the exhibit before or after the World Digital Preservation Games Event. The game event was led by UChicago Library’s digital preservation archivists and data service librarians and featured four different tabletop games that taught players various aspects of digital preservation work and concepts.   

Curation & Exhibitions Interest Group moderator Patti Gibbons and two attendees participated in the event, along with twenty UChicago library staff members.

We're thrilled to bring you a wrap-up from our hosts that they've shared with their own library:

On Tuesday evening, DePaul Special Collections and Archives welcomed members of the local professional organization, Chicago Area Archivists, as well as a few graduate students enrolled in MLIS programs (19 attendees). Morgen MacIntosh Hodgetts, Derek Potts, and Emily Swenson led groups in rotation around three areas/topics. Attendees all toured our closed stacks, learning about our collection strengths and how faculty members have been instrumental in connecting us with individuals and community organizations whose lives and work intersect with the University’s focus on social justice issues and advocacy for marginalized groups. We also showcased the department’s new Andrew T. and Alice O. Kopan Seminar Room which allows us to offer space for small groups of researchers to engage with collections together while individual researchers can still experience a quiet reading room. We also use the Kopan Seminar Room for the department’s new approach to exhibits. Since reopening after the pandemic, we’ve moved towards hosting temporary pop-up exhibits with selected resources set up in the Kopan Seminar Room on tables rather than using traditional exhibit cases with heavily curated exhibits. These pop-up exhibits give us an opportunity to highlight a variety of topics and heritage months throughout an academic year. During the Open House, attendees also learned about our instruction program by participating in a “pair and share” primary source activity designed for Discover and Explore First Year students. We received positive feedback from attendees including the following: “Many thanks to you and your staff for the wonderful event yesterday. I learned so much about your department in a very short time.” and “This was my first impression of DePaul and I was blown away.”

A huge thank you to our hosts at DePaul for coordinating this wonderful event - as an attendee I learned a lot and really enjoyed the opportunity to learn and socialize with my fellow CAA colleagues. Please enjoy images from the event below.

Morgen providing an introduction and logistics for the rotation.

Discussing marginalia in the Berrigan book collection on the stacks tour.

Emily talking about exhibits in the seminar room.

Derek leading a mini instruction session on the Young Lords.

This installment of CAA Reacts included twenty-four attendees and pulled together research on how federal, state, and local funding shifts—and the removal of government information—are reshaping the archival landscape in 2025. At the federal level, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) face deep cuts and restructuring, with mid-stream project terminations, canceled programs, and staff reductions. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has seen severe staff cuts and grant pauses, while the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) lost its Archivist in February 2025, prompting strong condemnation from the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Additional disruptions include the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) January grant freeze, executive orders restricting DEI, climate, and health-related content, and major cuts to EPA and public broadcasting funding.

In Illinois and Chicago, Illinois Humanities (IH) and the Illinois Arts Council Agency (IACA) continue regranting but face reduced federal passthrough funds. Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) remains comparatively stable, distributing ~$12M in cultural grants. Foundations like MacArthur, Mellon, and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation provide critical support, but Illinois’ ongoing fiscal issues and political targeting of equity initiatives remain risks.

A major development is the removal of government datasets and webpages following new executive orders and an OMB compliance memo. Agencies such as CDC, EPA, USDA, and NOAA unpublished or deleted climate, DEI, gender identity, and public health resources, including CDC HIV/AIDS guidance, EPA environmental justice indexes, and NOAA climate datasets. Archivists and researchers can still access much of this material through the End of Term Web Archive, Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, university-led rescue projects, the Data Rescue Project, and FOIA requests. Litigation has already forced partial restoration of some health and science pages, showing advocacy can work.

Strategic planning themes emphasize crisis preparation, diversifying funding, and partnerships, while centering staff and community well-being. Advocacy remains essential: tracking executive orders, supporting ALA’s “Show Up for Our Libraries,” and sharing local impact stories with legislators. Looking forward, archivists must contend with wealth inequality and the possibility of privatization of heritage, while also seizing the chance to build more resilient and community-centered archives.

Additionally, CAA has put together a new Resource List Related to Government Restriction of Information and Cultural Heritage Funding Cuts. 

This is the first release of materials in CAA’s new online repository that informs, provides advocacy ideas or support for archivists working in these trying times. The list will soon find a permanent place on the CAA website. If you come across resources—reports, webinars, toolkits, whitepapers, websites, etc. that belong in this list, please share them with us by emailing info@chicagoarchivists.org with a subject line of All Call.

Fourteen curious archivists attended the talk given by Liú Chen, Senior Programs Manager, at the National Public Housing Museum on Wednesday, September 24th. Liú gave an incredible presentation about the NPHM's oral history program, including

• an overview of the oral histories they have collected
• the hosting platform Aviary
• NPHM's collecting philosophy and process
• an introduction to the Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History
• their podcast, Out of the Archives
• and much more!

(picture provided by Kaitlyn Griffith)

During the Q&A, discussion turned to the uses and drawbacks of AI in oral history transcription—particularly concerns about how some AI companies use uploaded recordings to train their systems, raising serious questions about narrator privacy and consent as the museum continues to build its unique oral history collection.

We also explored the museum’s free exhibits, including History Lessons, a gallery of everyday artifacts from public housing residents; Care to Look, featuring salvaged pieces from the original Jane Addams Homes; and installations such as Living in the Shade and Art for All, Posters for the People.

A few of us got the chance to go on the Historic Apartments Tour, author included. It was an incredible learning experience, and one I would highly recommend.

Many thanks to our host, the NPHM!