All birthday parties need a cake and Columbia’s 250th Anniversary in 2003 was no different. Harlem native Patrick De’Shaun Dennis III, better known as Cake Man Raven, made a 13-foot-tall replica of Low Library in his signature flavor: red velvet. While this massive 3.5-ton cake was impressive, Cake Man Raven’s masterpiece was yet to come. […]
Tag: Columbia University
Harlem Renaissance Artist Charles Henry Alston
In 2018, Columbian Denise Murrell GSAS PhD 2014 was the curator of the Wallach Art Gallery’s “Posing modernity : the black model from Manet and Matisse to today.” Following this well-received show, her latest exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 25, 2024. Among the many […]
Mary Leticia Caldwell and Marie Maynard Daly
Marie Maynard Daly, who received her PhD in chemistry from Columbia in 1947, is considered the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in chemistry. At Columbia, Daly was one of the 18 graduate students who completed their degrees under Prof. Mary Leticia Caldwell’s sponsorship. Caldwell herself was also a “first.” In […]
Lewis A. Rosenthal Memorial Room Plaque
Have you ever wondered who else lived in “your” dorm room? Some Columbia students have been visited by returning alumni (see Art Garfunkle); others could search student directories and other sources available at the University Archives. But for a select few, from around the 1930s to the 1970s, there was a plaque right in their […]
Seth Low and The Gilded Age
The second season of Julian Fellow’s The Gilded Age on Max followed the lives of New Yorkers and Brooklynites in 1883. This season viewers learned about the fight to save the “colored schools” in New York, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, and even a visit to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Connected to all […]