Beth Watkins, manager of exhibition, interpretation, and visitor experience at the Spurlock Museum, discusses several exhibits relating to the Champaign-Urbana LGBTQ+ community. The first exhibit, In Her Closet, focused on drag costuming and highlighted local drag queens. One national queen who provided her outfits was Sasha Velour, a CU local and previous winner of RuPaul's Drag Race. The next exhibit discussed was Sewn in Memory, which displayed AIDS quilt panels from Central Illinois.
Georgia King, President of the Greater Community AIDS Project and a GCAP volunteer for almost 40 years, chronicles the organization’s founding—when it was still known as the Gay Community AIDS Project—and provides insight into the sort of urgency and stigma that resulted in GCAP’s founding during the 1980s. From there, King centers GCAP’s narrative in the realm of local AIDS activism through her discussion of their collaboration with organizations like the Prairie AIDS Foundation and the support of local volunteers to construct the GCAP boarding house. This boarding house, which has been in use for over 30 years, provides housing and food assistance to those living with AIDS.
James Andrew Dengate is an emeritus professor of Classics at Illinois and has worked with campus museums since 1975. With a B.A. from Michigan State University and M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently Director of Record for the Excavations at Halieis, Greece with which he has worked since 1965. Two volumes of the final reports of these excavations have appeared along with many preliminary reports.
Dengate and Pitard discuss the origins and vision of the Spurlock Museum. The collections, their organization, and repatriation are also major topics. Thumbnail image courtesy of The Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Wayne Pitard is an emeritus professor in the Department of Religion at Illinois and retired director of the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. With a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, his research has focused primarily on the religion of the ancient Canaanites, particularly on the only surviving library of Canaanite religious texts, found in the ruins of the city of Ugarit, Syria, and dating to about 1200 BCE. In September 2024, he also published Watchman, Tell Us: John J. Bird and Black Politics in Post-Civil War Illinois, research that began while he was director of the Spurlock Museum.
Wendy Mathewson and Beth Watkins (both BA '96) met in an avant-garde honors seminar, "The History that Music Made." They became roommates and lifelong friends. Both graduates of the Department of History, both women are employed by the university today. Mathewson is the undergraduate advisor for the Department of History, and Watkins is the Education and Publications Coordinator at the Spurlock Museum. In this interview, they describe campus life in the 1990s and the gradual shifts in their political, religious, and worldview perspectives that they attribute to a liberal arts education. They reflect on enduring friendship across deep differences, the value of finding smaller communities within a large university, exposure to diversity, and the importance of resilience.
