The Pull of Horses on Local and National Histories and Identities exhibition featured a 16 x 9 foot screen at the center of the gallery. This screen displayed an original documentary by Dr. Kim Marra and Mark Anderson which played on a loop during open hours.
Film: The Pull of Horses in Urban American Performance, 1860-1920 (2019)
This is an original full-length (72-minute) documentary created at the University of Iowa Digital Scholarship and
Publishing Studio over a three-and-a-half year collaboration by Kim Marra, Professor of Theatre Arts and American
Studies; Mark Anderson, Digital Scholarship and Collections Librarian; and Wade Hampton, a Theatre Arts major
(BA, 2018). The film is structured with an introduction and five sections—Life in Stables, Work Horses, Central Park,
Show Horses, and Horses on Stage—that illuminate how horses shaped gender and other human identities and bodies in and beyond the emerging U.S. cultural capital, New York City. Circa 1900, 130,000 horses lived and worked among 1.85 million people on the island of Manhattan. To gain a sense of that now forgotten density of urban horse presence, viewers were encouraged to experience as much of the video as possible in the gallery at full scale. The video is open-access and can also be viewed in its entirety online. Closed captioning is available as an option while viewing the film.
This image also is an excellent panoramic view of much of the exhibition and provides context for some of the more close-up exhibit documentation photographs.