Since 2019, Skowhegan has partnered with Bennington College to host one fellow annually as part of their Museum Term program. Fellows have typically worked with our archive in some capacity or another, and have included, chronologically, River Valadez, Sbobo Ndlangamandla, Kayly Hernandez Panameno, and Gaurav Aung.

This year’s Museum Term Fellow, Grace Muller, has worked relentlessly to complete processing of our document backlog. We are so grateful she has chosen to share her insights and talent with us through this personal interpretation of campus via documents she encountered throughout her work.

As a culmination of my 6 month internship processing materials for Skowhegan’s document archive, I’ve been piecing together a portrait of the campus.

Of the people I told about this job who were familiar with Skowhegan, most were confused why I wasn’t in Maine, because they didn't know about the New York office. For me, Skowhegan is the New York office. It's been fascinating to work in service of a program that I’ve never seen in action in a place I’ve never physically been to. I've developed a distinct insight into the program as it’s grown and changed over time—from the vantage of the office basement in Chelsea. In service of that contradiction, I have digitally collaged a selection of the documents I processed this spring into a map of Skowhegan as I intuitively (mis)understand it from afar.

I used documents spanning from the late ‘60s through the early 2000s, including photographs, sketches, maps of the grounds, scale models for new buildings, and floor plans for renovations. Throughout the process, I was taken by the haphazard beauty of Skowhegan's ever changing representation by a rotation of draftsmen and creatively minded administrators. There is great variety, for example, in the arrows drafted in the corners of campus maps to indicate due north.

I pulled and scanned over 100 physical documents and ended up using about 20 of them for the map. Below is a key to the structures I included, as well as some of the original documents.