Faculty member, students join Library of Congress staff members Feb. 25

“Insignias of Fort Ord: Art in Everyday Military Life” opened Feb. 11 at Monterey Museum of Art's Pacific Street location and will be up through April 18. Professor Enid Baxter Ryce, chair of the university’s Cinematic Arts and Technology Department, created the exhibition in collaboration with the Veterans Transition Center of Marina and CSUMB students to explore the art and symbolism of Fort Ord. The exhibit includes oral histories of local veterans collected by Professor Ryce and her students. Those histories will be included in the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress.

Rachel Mears, section head for Collections Access, Preservation and Analysis, and Megan Harris, reference specialist, will visit on Feb. 25 from the Library of Congress to help illuminate the Veterans History Project collections, speak to both the elemental and universal importance of place-based memories expressed in the collections, and answer questions about participation.

Harris and Mears will talk at noon in the Cinematic Arts Building on Sixth Avenue and at 6 p.m. at the Monterey Museum of Art’s Pacific Street location. They will be joined on a panel by Professor Ryce, students who worked on the project and veterans.

The Veterans History Project collects, preserves, and makes accessible the firsthand remembrances of U.S. war veterans from World War I through the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.

Completely reliant on the voluntary participation of people around the country interviewing the veterans in their lives and communities, the project, now 15 years old, holds more than 99,000 individual stories.

Read a blog post about the Veterans History Project and Fort Ord

Published Feb. 16, 2016