Special Collections - Anteater Antics

Archives for December 2010

Christine Tamblyn (1951-1998), Digital Arts Pioneer

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UCI Assistant Professor Christine Tamblyn was an American visual artist and critic most active in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1970s through the 1990s. She was best known for her performance pieces and multimedia works untilizing CD-ROM and video. While an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1970s, she taught graduate level courses in video. She was also involved in performance art in Chicago and New York,  influenced by Allen Kaprow and others. Throughout her career she was actively involved in a variety of national and international conferences, workshops, symposia, lectures and festivals. In 1982 she entered the MFA program at UCSD, studying with Eleanor and David Antin and Allen Kaprow. In 1985 she began teaching at San Francisco State University and made contributions to numerous important art journals as an influential critic. She taught at UCB and Florida International University before joining the UCI Studio Art Department in 1996. She was committed to feminist politics and cross-disciplinary scholarship. Christine Tamblyn was internationally recognized for her work. Students and colleagues alike regarded her as an innovative and compassionate educator. She was instrumental in developing the foundation for a digital arts program at UCI. She died on January 1, 1998 in San Francisco of breast cancer.  The Christine Tamblyn Papers (MS-F011) are located in the UCI Special Collections and Archives.

MS-F011. Christine Tamblyn Papers. Special Collections and Archives, the UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

Reading Room Renovation

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Special Collections and Archives has moved temporarily to the Southeast Asian Archive in Room 360 on the third floor of Langson Library. We hope to be open in a renovated facility on the fifth floor of Langson in mid to late January 2011.  You can reach us at spcoll@uci.edu or 949-824-3947. Hours in the Southeast Asian Archive are Monday-Friday, 1-5pm. Below are a few early photographs of progress on the renovation.

Update on 1/28/2015: The Southeast Asian Archive Reading Room has moved! The Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive (OC & SEAA) Center is now in the Libraries Gateway Study Center in Room 104. More information is available here: http://www.lib.uci.edu/features/spotlights/new_ocseaa.html

F. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995

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F. Sherwood Rowland (UCI), Mario J. Molina (MIT) and Paul J. Crutzen (Max-Planck-Institute) were awarded jointly the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone.” In his Nobel lecture on December 8, 1995, Professor Rowland said: “When Mario Molina joined my research group [at UCI] as a postdoctoral research associate later in 1973, he elected the chloroflourocarbon problem among several offered to him, and we began the scientific search for the ultimate fate of such molecules. At the time neither of us had any significant experience treating chemical problems of the atmosphere, and each of us was now operating well away from our previous areas of expertise.”  Mario Molina has said of that period, “Three months after I arrived at Irvine, Sherry and I developed the ‘CFC-ozone depletion theory.’ At first the research did not seem to be particularly interesting….” 

Over twenty years later, in the Press Release from the Nobel Foundation announcing the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Nobel Foundation stated: “Thanks to our good scientific understanding of the ozone problem — and very largely to Crutzen, Molina and Rowland — it has been possible to make far-reaching decisions on prohibiting the release of gases that destroy ozone.” 

The photograph below is of Rowland (left) and Molina (right) in Rowland’s lab at UCI in the mid-1970s.  The photograph is from the F. Sherwood Rowland Papers (MS-F029), which is being processed now and will be available for research in 2011.



MS-F029. F. Sherwood Rowland Papers. Special Collections and Archives, the UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.