(soft music) (beeping) (dramatic music) - Eye on Education.

I'm Fred Martino.

Upfront this week, a fascinating bit of history from Southern Illinois University.

We learn more in this report from the SIU Alumni Association.

- Hey, Salukis, this is Anna Twomey here with our very first edition of Saluki Sleuths.

This time we're uncovering the story behind the cannon.

And if you're familiar with the cannon, you know it was an icon here on campus, a monument out on display for everyone to see.

It brought people together, it caused some controversy and then it suddenly disappeared right from this spot where I'm standing.

People wondered why and how.

We went digging and found some answers.

A path through the University Museum takes you back 200 years to the corner the cannon calls home.

The curators watch over it.

- My name is WM Stoerger, and I am the Curator of Exhibits at the University Museum.

- My name is Susannah Munson.

I'm the Curator of the Collections at the University Museum.

- [Anna] The display is simple compared to the cannon's colorful past.

The chunks of paint that used to layer it have been preserved.

- The cannon has been a popular piece of campus history and legend for a long time.

Students used to paint the cannon for homecomings and other celebrations, probably political protests as well.

- [Anna] Alumni remember the back and forth paint jobs as frequent and unpredictable.

- I think it was an exciting piece for a lot of people.

I mean, it was on campus during some pretty turbulent times.

- [Anna] Until one day it was gone.

Susannah Munson is piecing together the trail, starting with where the cannon came from.

- The cannon was made in the early 1800s, but came to SIU campus in 1878 to be used by the Douglas Corps Cadets to mark their drills.

- [Anna] Susannah says the cannon was live and functioning.

The Cadets used it until around 1891.

- [Susannah] At that point they stopped using it and it just became a piece that sat on campus out in front of the north entrance.

- [Anna] As many of our alumni know, that's when the real show started.

- I do think that the years of being painted actually protected the cannon a lot by keeping the actual surface of the cannon protected from the elements.

- [Anna] Alumni say it was often the fraternities who took turns painting the cannon, but we discovered it was also a fraternity behind the cannon's disappearance.

- In 1985, the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, for part of a service project, removed the cannon, took all the paint off of it.

That caused a lot of controversy on campus.

People really enjoyed having the campus cannon sitting right there where they could interact with it and sit on it.

- [Anna] Decades later, the cannon still has people fired up.

- There was a lot of concern about who took it and why they took it and was it coming back and why would you take it in the first place and will it be the same?

- The cannon holds a real soft spot in a lot of people's hearts of certain generations.

A lot of old alumni come through wanting to know where it's at, what happened to it, and they're all pretty excited to see that it's on display in the museum.

(quirky music) - Thanks to Anna and the SIU Alumni Association for that report.

A very interesting history of the cannon at the SIU Museum, and to learn more about the cannon and many other issues, we welcome museum curator, Susannah Munson.

Susannah, thank you for joining us, and we're gonna talk about a lot of things, but I do wanna start with the cannon.

As you researched this, what stood out most to you?

- Well, as someone who didn't arrive on this campus until about 20 years after the cannon was removed, I had heard little bits of it because it was in the collection, but what was really surprising was how divisive it was when it got removed.

There were protests.

I found pictures of people protesting with signs.

They had built a mock grave for the cannon and the site and had a funeral for it.

So I was really surprised that it was such an important piece of campus having not been here when it was on campus.

Also a little surprised that people found a way to set it off a couple of times before they removed the fuse and everything from it, so.

- Why all the protests?

- It was just a really central piece of campus life, really focused people's attention on it for homecomings, different events.

We found pictures of it dressed up with Captain Hook and the crocodile, and I'm not sure what that was for, but it seemed to be really important to campus life.

- So some people liked it, maybe others, not so much.

- Other people did not care for it.

They thought it was an embarrassment to the community because it was always painted and they thought it looked messy and inappropriate.

- Well, and talk about interesting here in terms to emphasize how controversial this was.

A very surprising event in 1985, long time ago, 1985, prompted the university to remove the cannon from the outdoor home.

Tell me about that event.

- Well, I think that the event was a little bit coincidental.

The explosion that morning, so they removed the cannon and it was planned to be removed at daybreak on that day.

- But at about one o'clock in the morning, the police got out there because somebody had tried to, well, there was a homemade explosive that had been attached to the cannon on the underside and it had been detonated.

They chalked it up to a prank, and since I think they knew that it was getting ready to be gone, they didn't really push that too much.

But the attempt at blowing up a cannon is brave, I guess.

- Yeah, so it was gonna be- - It would be very effective.

- Yeah, so it was gonna be removed, but someone, I guess, wanted to give it a little more attention with this action, very dangerous action.

And that is something that's part of the history.

- Yes, but there's no damage to the cannon.

It hadn't been cleaned or anything yet, so I think the paint probably took a lot of the damage.

- And we shouldn't, you know, we gotta mention here, we can't overlook.

This really is an interesting part of history beyond the display of this cannon at the university that it dates back to somewhere between 1810 and 1840.

- Yeah, we don't have a lot of good information about where it, you know, where it came from originally.

I think with some research with maybe the department with the federal administrative agency, they might be able to find out more, but it was made between 1810 and 1840, as you said.

And I have heard suggestions that it was made somewhere around, I wanna say Ohio, around Cincinnati and then made its way- It was one of two cannons that came to campus at the same time.

Nobody's sure what happened to the second.

And we know that they were utilized in the Civil War, but we have no record of where that might have been, if it was involved in anything we might recognize.

- Very interesting.

We do know though that this type of cannon, was used for artillery drills.

Explain that for us.

- The cannons came to campus specifically for use for artillery drills with the Douglas Corps Cadets who were on campus at Southern Illinois Normal University.

And they used it, I believe until about 1890.

I'm not sure if it just marked when the drills were gonna be.

I'm not entirely sure how it was used, but it was functioning and utilized for a good while on campus, yeah.

- That's very interesting.

So it actually had some function in training before it became something that was simply a focal point outside and then in your museum.

- Right, yes.

- Very interesting.

Well, there are a lot of interesting things at the museum, and so we have some photos of some things that we wanna look through today.

And just as a sampling, of course, I'm gonna start with a painting that was displayed during the museum's Black History Month program.

- Yeah, just recently we had a Black History Month exhibit in partnership with the university's Black History Month activities on campus.

The painting is called "The Seamstress" by Jacob Lawrence.

It was painted in 1946.

And Jacob Lawrence was one of the first nationally recognized African American artists in the United States and was the most celebrated African American artist of the 1940s.

So that we have a piece from his, you know, peak of his career is really special.

I believe it came to campus- It came in 1968 and I believe it was purchased by the University Galleries.

So at the time, University Galleries had all the art and everything and University Museum had everything else and then at a later time they merged.

So it came to campus as part of the beautification projects, you know, in the mid-century when they brought in new furniture and art to spruce campus up.

- So something that people had a chance to see earlier this year and may see again during another Black History Month.

- And in publications.

We actually have worked with two different museums this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art about this painting, and it will be featured in a publication by the Baltimore Museum of Art about the African American artists of the Great Migration.

- Very interesting.

All right, well, speaking of these incredible things that you can see at the museum, we also have a work created as part of the Works Progress Administration, often referred to as the WPA.

- We have a lot of pieces that were created as part of the WPA which ran through the museum on campus.

So the piece that we're showing is called the "Coal Miner."

It is by a sculptor named Fred Myers, who was a Southern Illinois native and had been a coal miner around west Frankfort area.

And then in 1939, he started working for the museum doing WPA projects, and he made these beautiful carved wooden sculptures.

Over the course of his life, he made approximately 120 or so pieces that we know of.

He whittled a lot of small pieces for people, but we have about 30 of them in the collection right now, including the one that he was working on when he passed, so an unfinished sculpture.

- Mining's such an important part of the history of this area, so I'm sure a lot of people who visit the museum appreciated seeing that to see part of the history of their family.

- And the "Coal Miner" sculpture is on exhibit currently in the permanent exhibit for Southern Illinois History.

- Okay, great.

Well, speaking of things with a local connection, we now have an item made for the Carbondale Fair in the late 1800s.

- Yes, in 1884, Kirkpatrick Pottery and Anna made a- They made lots of fair jugs, jugs that they made specific for various fairs in small towns.

This one was for the Carbondale Fair and it's decorated with essentially a directory of local businesses and schools and other institutions.

So you can find lawyers and doctors and banks and school administrators from everywhere from Southern Illinois Normal School to elementary and high school administrators.

It's a really interesting piece of history, especially because when you read all the names, you can see people that you know.

You definitely see last names of people you recognize from town or from buildings on campus, so lots of important names on there.

- That's great.

Yeah, so you can really get a sense of how long those names go back in the history of the area.

- Yes.

And originally, when they made the jug, on the bottom, there's a message that tells you not only which potter made it, but also tells a story about how the jug is intended to be passed from mayor to mayor for 100 years.

So it was supposed to pass mayor to mayor until 1984, when they imagined that the mayor city council would sell it at an auction and use the proceeds to go to a charity of their choice.

But in 1980, they decided they would rather preserve the history for Carbondale, so they donated it to the museum, city council did.

- That's great.

Well, of course the SIU Museum not only honors regional history, but history from all over the world, and I was surprised to find out that the museum has about 2000 items in its New Guinea collection, and you have one to tell us about here.

- Yes.

The image that we're showing is of a suspension hook from New Guinea and suspension hooks were hung in the houses of different people in the community.

And on the bottom, there's a sort of anchor-shaped hook, and that was used to hang net bags.

The net bags might store clothing or food or anything else they wanted to keep up off the floor away from bugs or other pests that might get into it.

The decoration on the suspension hook typically is of totemic animals or ancestral spirits that relate to the owner of the suspension hook, to their family or clan symbols, so they have a spiritual aspect to them as well as being functional.

- Wow, that is really interesting.

Well, speaking of international, we also have an item, another item from the collection in the International Art Gallery.

- Yes.

This painting is called "Monkey in a Willow Tree", and it dates to 1939.

It was painted by a Chinese artist, Wong Ding Ping, who was a very famous artist and widely exhibited during the 1920s to 1940s in China.

This piece comes from a relatively recent donation.

We started working on it in 2019, but we didn't actually finish until 2021.

As you can imagine, it was hard to, to do some of the work while we're all from home.

But we've got this collection from Dr. To, Dr. Cho-Yee To, who was not only one of the first graduate students at the Dewey Center at SIU, but is a professor emeritus at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

So he has this deep and abiding love for SIU because the Dewey Center was so important to him, so he wanted to donate some pieces to the museum, so we have several paintings and scrolled calligraphy works.

He himself is a calligrapher and studies the history of Chinese calligraphy.

So the collection also included a lot of tools, the traditional tools for calligraphy, including ink sticks and ink stones, paint brushes, special paper that's used for it.

So we've got the paper from China, Japan, Korea, and they're just really beautiful pieces.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I'm glad you got a chance to show a number of these to kind of get people ready when they come and visit the museum.

Things that they might look for.

We don't have time, of course, to show everything at the museum when folks visit.

What are some other things they should look for?

- Well, in our permanent exhibits, we have the Southern Illinois History exhibit, which we are in the process of trying to update right now.

While it is a permanent exhibit, there is an area of it that we reserve for rotating exhibits, where we can sort of pull out more specific Illinois history stories, campus history, various things like that, and really focus on them in a smaller portion of the exhibit.

So while some of it stays, you know, it maintains in the same way, there are other parts of it that we will rotate out.

There's also the Lutes Gallery, which is a permanent gallery in the very front of the south hall and it features a collection from Southern Illinois native Carl Lutes of Renaissance art, including tapestries, paintings, furniture, sculpture, really beautiful pieces, and we did not have a lot of Renaissance art in the collection before that, so we're really excited to be able to have that and to show it.

- Okay.

Well, as you mentioned, in addition to the permanent exhibits, you have special exhibits.

Tell me about your goals when you come up with a special exhibit.

- With the special rotating exhibits, we tend to try to highlight local or regional artists.

When we can, we'll put out calls for artists to be parts of exhibits that we have.

Sometimes groups will approach us, so we might have, you know, local groups of artists involving exhibits there.

Sometimes we've had agricultural exhibits involving local groups.

And then we also try to use- You know, our collection- Our conservative estimate is about 75,000 objects, so we try really hard to get as much of it out and seen as we can.

It's a daunting task to try to get so many pieces on rotation.

- So the hard part is not finding something, it's deciding what, you know, amongst so many different items- - Narrowing it down is always the hardest.

- Gosh.

- But we have so many wonderful pieces, and so sometimes making the exhibits is actually not so bad.

You can walk around the collection and you see things that inspire, you know, potential exhibits.

My GA's and I are always coming up with a bunch of mythical exhibits that if one day, if we have time, maybe we'll do an exhibit on this or that.

- All right, well, speaking of GA's, graduate assistants, tell me about student opportunities at the museum.

I imagine it's really an engaging place for students to work or intern.

- Yes.

I think every student we've ever had work at the museum has really loved it.

We have students that we use in lots of different ways.

So we have student workers who actually work in the exhibits, in the galleries as greeters and docents.

We have graduate assistants that work either with me in collections, taking care of the collections, accessioning in new donations or with the exhibits where they help build and install the exhibits that we produce.

And then occasionally I will have interns, not only from departments on campus, but also from institutions outside of SIU.

- And Susannah, how did you become interested in this field?

- Well, my background is in anthropology.

I got my undergraduate degree in anthropology and then worked in archeology for a number of years in the southeast.

So I got really interested- I had already had an interest in material culture, but then being able to, you know, excavate things straight from the ground was really fascinating.

And so I came to graduate school here in the anthropology department.

While I was there, I had a graduate assistantship at the museum and I loved it so much.

And I did it as long as I could do it as a graduate assistant.

So then when the curator retired, then I applied for that position.

It sort of was a surprise.

I had always wanted to work in a museum, but never actually planned to do it.

You know, I thought, well, I'm doing archeology, I don't know if I can get there from here, and it all worked out.

- That's great, and really gives you a special connection to the students that you give them a chance that you had that led to your career here.

- Yes, and a lot of the students have taken that opportunity and really done great things with it.

- That's fabulous.

What do you suggest for someone who's considering a career like yours?

- Well, there's a couple of different ways that people tend to get into museums.

The sort of old fashioned way was through a specialty, you know, sort of how I got into museums through a discipline where you focus on a type of a field and you focus on types of artifacts or things like that.

These days, there are a lot of museum studies programs, both undergraduate and graduate level.

It's a relatively new sort of field specifically as museum studies.

So there's a lot of relatively new programs out for museum studies, so that is definitely a way to go.

Through that method, you learn more general museum theory rather than knowing specifically a lot about a particular subject matter, which comes in maybe a little more with creating exhibits and doing the research for them.

- Okay, so, and of course, during any academic study internships and working- - Internships, yes, and I tell all of my students who want to know, you know, how can I keep working in museums, offer to work anywhere.

And then help wherever you can.

Because if you've got experience in some of these things that we offer experience in, exhibits or collections, you might work in the store or as a ticket taker, but if somebody needs help, then maybe you can slide in there and help and sort of make yourself useful that way and work your way up through there.

- Well, preserving history is so important.

We of course try to do that in public media as well.

What are your biggest challenges in doing this work?

- The biggest challenge is preserving in general, everything, you know, with such a large collection and the materials run the entire gamut.

Wood, stone, cloth, feathers, just anything you can think of.

So trying to make sure that we can take care of everything in a way that maintains its stability, continues making it useful for exhibitions and education in the future, it's an ongoing struggle.

You know, everything is trying to fall apart all the time, so trying to take care of it and just make sure that it lasts long enough to be enjoyed for future generations.

- I understand that.

We have those challenges in media too.

- Oh yes, there's some really bad ones there.

- Tell me about your hopes for the future at the museum, programs or other enhancements that you'd like to add when you're able to do that.

- A couple of areas where I would like us to kind of move into is into a museum studies program.

We used to offer one, but then when we had the state budget problems and everything, we sort of had to let that go and it was such a great program.

I would love to have it back.

Very few people came through that program without having a deep and abiding love for museums and professors from all around the country would email me and comment on how great they thought the program was.

So definitely into a museum studies program and in a shorter term, I'd like for us to do more outreach, to have more programs, especially for younger school kids, because a lot of the art programming in elementary and middle schools has been so depleted over the years.

It's nice to be able to kind of offer an extra little bit of art education or history education where we can.

- Well, I'm glad you were able to do this outreach with us today to, you know, reach our audience so that people will hopefully see this and want to come visit.

- Absolutely.

We love having visitors at the museum and there's always something new to see, some interesting little thing.

- And of course, folks can find more information on the siu.edu website and should know that the museum normally is open when classes are in session, right?

- Yes, we're open when the school's in session.

We are closed on Mondays, but we're open Tuesday through Saturday.

- All right, SIU museum curator, Susannah Munson.

Susannah, thank you for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- All right, thank you so much as well to all of you at home for everyone at WSIU.

I'm Fred Martino.

Have a great week.

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