New Exhibits Set to Inaugurate Renovation Completion
The Briscoe Center’s public service spaces, located in Sid Richardson Hall Unit 2 on the University of Texas at Austin campus, will reopen Monday April, 10. The newly renovated spaces include a reading room and three distinct areas for exhibitions—the exhibit hall, the exhibit gallery, and the Weatherby gallery. Inaugural exhibits will debut in each space.
From Commemoration to Education:Pompeo Coppini’s Statue of Jefferson Davis will debut in the center’s exhibit hall. The Davis statue was originally part of a war memorial at the University of Texas at Austin. It stood on the South Mall of campus until August 2015, when the university’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, decided to relocate it to the Briscoe Center. The Davis statue will be on permanent display at the center as part of an educational exhibit. From Commemoration to Education represents a temporary expanded version of the permanent exhibit.
Exploring the American South speaks to the many layers of Southern history—from revolution to Reconstruction—through a wide array of artifacts including photographs, letters and ledgers, sheet music, clothing and military hardware. Objects on display shed light on the “long 19th century”. The exhibit will share the voices and histories of those who lived and worked in the South, including enslaved individuals, soldiers, homemakers, planters, jurists and free people of color. Exploring the American South will debut in the center’s new 3,500-square-foot exhibit gallery.
Imagined Communities: Selections from the Weatherby Map Collection will debut in the Dr. T. Karman and Carolyn Weatherby Gallery. The selections vividly illustrate ways in which mapmakers and publishers chose to communicate a sense of place and population in America through the 18th and 19th centuries. T. Karman Weatherby, a San Angelo physician, was an enthusiastic collector of maps. Imagined Communities displays some of the finest examples from his collection of more than 4,000 maps, engravings and related materials, donated to the Briscoe Center by his family in 2013.
Until April, the center’s public services will continue to operate out of the special collections reading room of the LLILAS Benson Latin American Collection in SRH1. For more information, visit: http://www.cah.utexas.edu/research/visit.php.
