By Rory Engel ’26

I have always been fascinated by the materiality of art and small objects and who may have owned, touched, and interacted with them in the past. For this reason, working as an assistant in the Visual Research Center, specifically focusing on nearly twenty medals in the Blick-Harris Study Collection, has been such an exciting part of my semester. I have been responsible for looking at the information already available on Kenyon’s digital catalog, fact checking it, and gathering any other information I may find about the medal or its creator. In addition to my research, I have worked to create concise yet comprehensive descriptions of each medal, including historical context when necessary.

The majority of the medals I have researched thus far are American and European. One medal that I was especially happy to research was a commemorative plaque made for Friedrich von Schiller, which required special attention to the very small artist signature as well as collaboration with Professor Brad Hostetler in order to identify the creator as Arnold Hartig. The process of pinpointing the artist required us to make educated guesses of what name was etched into the medal, search various names and key terms related to the medal’s imagery and origins, and read descriptions of medals online that match this medal’s description in order to correctly name Hartig as the artist. I have really enjoyed my time investigating these details which may seem small, but have opened me up to a plethora of new information about the various medals and their artists!

My most recent research was on a medal commemorating the creation of the French First Republic, and this research was especially fascinating due to the sheer detail of the imagery and the number of inscriptions. Relying on other museums descriptions of the medal, in this case the British Museum, as a way to fact check my own information was incredibly helpful. On the other hand, I also discovered some information available that was incorrect, such as instances of misspelled inscriptions. In these instances, it has become clear to me that the best descriptions will be written based on a combination of a variety of external sources found and my own visual observations, which will allow for the greatest accuracy.

As someone who hopes to one day pursue a career within a museum, my semester working as a VRC Assistant has been an incredibly helpful stepping stone in achieving this. Through my practice of handling artifacts, researching each object, and applying this research to different imagery and contexts, I feel more confident in my understanding of the behind-the-scene aspects of a museum.

Rory Engel ’26 is an Art History major from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.