Ransom Center Magazine

About Leigh Hilford

Hilford is an undergraduate intern working with public affairs for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Cold War culture

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Erik Mortenson discusses his book Ambiguous Borderlands and the pervasiveness of shadow imagery in Cold War materials.

Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) investigates the role shadows play in Cold War literary and popular texts. Informed by research at the Ransom Center, it examines Beat literature, postwar photography, film noir, Twilight Zone episodes, and more to explain why shadow imagery had such a hold on American imaginations in the mid-twentieth century. [Read more…] about Cold War culture

Preserving Arnold Newman’s photography slides

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The Ransom Center’s Arnold Newman papers and photography collection, acquired in 2006, includes more than 25,000 prints, original sitting books, early sketchbooks, photographic albums, and video recordings of interviews and lectures. Newman, who lived from 1918 to 2006, was a prolific artist known for his “environmental portraiture,” a style which captures a subject in his or her typical setting. Conservator Diana Diaz treated sets of color slides wrapped in different types of tape. [Read more…] about Preserving Arnold Newman’s photography slides

Take home a little bit of Mexico with vintage travel postcards

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Mid-twentieth-century travel materials aimed to depict Mexico as an exotic destination

The Ransom Center’s current exhibition Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1945 showcases Mexican art immediately following the Mexican Revolution in 1920 to the 1940s when it entered the American mainstream. [Read more…] about Take home a little bit of Mexico with vintage travel postcards

Meet the Staff: An interview with new Curator of Art Tracy Bonfitto

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Tracy Bonfitto has joined the Ransom Center as the new curator of art. She has worked at the Getty Research Institute, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was previously a lecturer in the Art History Department at UCLA. [Read more…] about Meet the Staff: An interview with new Curator of Art Tracy Bonfitto