Although I was not able to visit in person, I was able to connect with Maura Lyons from Drake University about a Magic Lantern show and exhibit that she organized.
The show is called "Acts Of Projection: Magic Lantern Shows and the U.S. Civil War and it encompasses both the material artifacts of lantern shows – hand-painted slides and period projectors – as well as actual projections to simulate the original viewing experience.
The show which contains about 40 lantern slides. Most of the show is drawn from a collection she assembled when working on a chapter for a current book project on popular imagery of the U.S. Civil War though the show also has slides loaned from the Brinton Collection at the University of Iowa Libraries and the State Historical Museum of Iowa.
They also staged a lantern show performed by Michael Zahs before Thanksgiving at a local theater as part of the programming for the exhibition. Michael is the collector/historian featured in the documentary Saving Brinton and all the slides he showed were borrowed from the Brinton Collection for the event.
They are displaying the slides in various ways. They photographed all the slides and are projecting them in digital format at a large scale on one wall of the gallery. They also built an artificial wall to hold 18 of the slides, illuminated from behind. The rest, they are placed in cases on stands and lit from below by LED strips.
The following pages are from the catalog produced by the Anderson Gallery at Drake University. The catalog has images of objects from the University of Iowa Libraries — Special Collections and Archives and the State Historical Museum of Iowa.
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