Thanks to a collaboration with UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, a special collection of archival drawings are protected for generations to come.
Mostly through books, magazines, online subscriptions, and oral histories, The Mint Museum Library and Archives provides context for the museum’s various collections. In addition, there are special collections in the library that offer unique glimpses into the Mint’s art and artifacts, as well as the cultures and people behind the creations.
One strong example is the library’s collection of El Tajín Drawings and Photography by art historian Michael Edwin Kampen-O’Riley, PhD. The collection is comprised of 264 line drawings of low-relief carvings found on the structures of El Tajín, an ancient Mesoamerican site in Veracruz, Mexico. A small selection of these drawings was displayed in the installation El Tajín: Photography and Drawings by Michael Kampen in 2018 at Mint Museum Randolph.
About the El Tajín drawings
In 1992, El Tajín was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its unique architecture and for what it illustrates about Mesoamerican life, beliefs, and customs from 800- 1200 CE.
The drawings depict the carvings of four sculpture groups of El Tajín: the Pyramid of Niches, the South Ball Court, the North Ball Court, and the Mound of Building Columns. UNESCO considers the Pyramid of Niches at El Tajín to be “a masterpiece of ancient Mexican and American architecture.”
The library’s collection of El Tajín drawings were traced on vellum from scaled photographs of the site taken in the late 1960’s by Kampen-O’Riley, a retired professor emeritus of art history who taught for many years at UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture and who is well known for his scholarship on non-Western art history.
Kampen-O’Riley gifted the drawings and photographs to The Mint Museum Library in 2004. The erosion at the site made the carvings hard to view in the photos he had originally taken of the site. The traced line drawings allowed for easier viewing and interpretation and have been increasingly more useful as El Tajín’s architecture suffers further erosion. Small reproductions of the drawings were first shared in Kampen-O’Riley’s 1972 book “The Sculptures of El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico.”
Several noted books about El Tajín reference the importance of the drawings, photographs, and writings included in this text. Scholar Rex Koontz writes that “Michael Kampen (-O’Riley…) was the first person to publish a systematic study of the site’s iconography as a whole. His book “The Sculptures of El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico” was by far the most important publication on the imagery up to that time. In it he illustrated the entire known corpus of sculpture with careful line drawings that have proved invaluable to all later researchers.” (Koontz, 2009).
The book is now out of print, so access to all of the drawings is again limited — until now.
Kampen-O’Riley, Michael Edwin (American, 1939–). South Ball Court Panel 5, circa 1967, ink
on vellum. Collection of The Mint Museum Library. SC2008.3.92. I
The digitization project
Over two decades, The Mint Museum Library searched for the right digitization opportunity for the El Tajín drawings. One of the original challenges was getting quality scans for the largest drawings that are up to 4-feet wide. Another challenge was capturing enough contrast on the transparent vellum material.
Thanks to technological advances and a partnership with UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, the digitization project took flight in 2023. The college was excited to digitize the drawings and make them available to its faculty and students, particularly because of Kampen-O’Riley’s contributions as a faculty member at UNC Charlotte.
Today, all 264 drawings are digitized and available to scholars worldwide via the digital library JSTOR that provides free access to millions of images, articles, and books. The project is possible thanks to the incredible work of Jenna Duncan, visual resources lecturer at the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, who masterfully scanned and photographed even the largest drawings. “I thoroughly enjoyed having the chance to digitize the drawings and to make them available to a wider audience,” Duncan says. “Since much of the College of Arts + Architecture’s faculty work has been lost over the years, I am especially grateful to be able to add these drawings to our collections and allow future students to study and learn from these important works.”
One of Kampen-O’Riley’s El Tajín drawings will be included in the exhibition Generations: 60 Years/21 Conversations on view at the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture this October. The exhibition is a celebration of the College of Arts + Architecture’s 60th anniversary and highlights the work of the college’s faculty and students throughout its history.
–Jennifer Winford, librarian at The Mint Museum.