News
Juilee Decker

The Rochester Beacon talks to John Aasp, gallery director, and Juilee Decker, professor in the Department of History, about the “Clarissa Uprooted: Unearthing Stories of Our Village (1940s-early 1970s),” exhibit at City Art Space.

Starting on June 3, the exhibit “Clarissa Uprooted: Unearthing Stories of Our Village (1940s-early 1970s)” will open in the RIT City Art Space. This show, created through a partnership between the Center for Teen Empowerment in Rochester and the Clarissa Street Reunion Committee, has involved a number of collaborators including RIT faculty and students from the College of Art and Design and the College of Liberal Arts.

The field of museum studies is changing. Not only are the people working in nationwide cultural institutions becoming more diverse, but the narratives told within those institutions are more inclusive and equity-focused. RIT’s museum studies program, led by Program Director Juilee Decker, aims to accelerate this momentum.

The Tina Lent Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Museum Studies was given on Friday, March 18, 2022 as part of the College’s 42^nd Annual Writing Awards Ceremony. The award followed in the tradition of awards named in honor of other College of Liberal Arts faculty, including Stan McKenzie and Mary C. Sullivan, both esteemed former deans of the College of Liberal Arts. The inaugural recipient was Hannah Rachel Riley, a third-year student from Buffalo, NY who is undertaking her thesis this semester and will graduate in May 2022.

When Tamar W. Carroll became a trustee of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in 2020, her appointment added to the web of connections Rochester Institute of Technology has with the cultural institution. 

Rochester Institute of Technology and Genesee Country Village & Museum (GCV&M) have re-affirmed their collaboration between the entire university and the living history museum with an historic village, art gallery, nature center with five miles of trails, and historic base ball field.

While processing a box of donated items, Kirsten Feigel ’15 (museum studies), a cataloguer for Strong National Museum of Play, came across a rare piece of video game history—a demo of Super Mario Bros. 3 that was created in 1990 by id Software in an attempt to persuade Nintendo to partner with them to develop a version of the game for PC computers.

RIT volunteers are building an exhibition called Hostile Terrain 94, which will open to the public on campus later this fall. The RIT exhibition is part of a global pop-up exhibition that will take place in around 150 cities nationally and internationally in 2021-22 to highlight the crisis along the US-Mexico border.

The Museum Association of New York features imaging science and museum studies students for developing an affordable imaging system to help museums and libraries preserve and expand access to their collections department.

Katie Keegan has always been a fan of history. As a child growing up in Ithaca, N.Y., Keegan would ask her parents to plan family vacations to museums or historical sites, not Disneyworld or the beach. So when it was time for Keegan to decide on a college major, her parents suggested museum studies.

Students Devin Hull and Sophie Walter are using their creativity to expand ongoing digital efforts of the Genesee Country Village & Museum.

Scientists from RIT are developing affordable imaging systems to help libraries and museums preserve and expand access to their historical collections. The project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to create a low-cost spectral imaging system and software that can be used to recover obscured and illegible text on historical documents.