Use Restrictions

Permission to publish material from Richard E. Ahlborn Slide Collection must be obtained from Special Collections, Virginia Tech.

Access Restrictions

The collection is open for research.

Preferred Citation

Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: Richard E. Ahlborn Slide Collection, Ms2019-020, Special Collections, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va.

Acquisition Information

This collection was donated to the Art & Architecture Libray in 2005. It was part of several slide collections transferred to Special Collections in 2018.

Processing Information

The processing, arrangement, and description of the Richard E. Ahlborn Slide Collection was completed in May 2019.

Biographical Note

Richard E. Ahlborn was born in 1933. Throughout his career, he was a specialist in Mexican American art. Prior to the 1950s, he served as a curator at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a photographer for the Department of Cultural History in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology, later the National Museum of American History. In 1964, he took a position as a curator in for the museum, a job he held until his retirement in 2002. In 2005, Ahlborn donated his extensive slide collection, created over some 50 years of scholarship, to the Art + Architecture Library at Virginia Tech. His later research focused on the San Xavier del Bac mission church in Tuscon, Arizona, and its restoration. Ahlborn died in Maryland in 2015 at the age of 82.

Scope and Content

The Richard E. Ahlborn Slide Collection contains more than 3,000 slides created and collected by Ahlborn over his extensive career as a photographer, curator, and scholar of Mexican American art. Slides include images of artworks, architecture, buildings (especially churches), towns, crafts/furniture, graphic art pieces, tools, textiles, and religious objects. The majority of the slides relate to Mexican, United States, Central American, South American, and Spanish objects and locations, though there are smaller sets of images from China, Japan, Italy, and the Philippines. Individual slides in the collection are labeled by location, at the very least, but usually with additional details.

Arrangement

The slides were orginally housed in boxes or sheets in labeled groupings. Slides were rehoused in boxes by geographic region (reflecting the creator's original organization, usually be type of subject--artwork, towns, architecture, crafts, etc.). Materials have been placed in alphabetical order by geographical name.

Following the donation of additional materials in spring of 2021, a second series was added wherein slides appear in the order in which they were received. One folder contains Ahlborn's inventory and his description of his organizational system.

Subjects and Indexing Terms

• Architecture (discipline)
• Works of art