Meet The Curator
Celia Daniel has been the curator for the Channing Pollock Theater Collection for more than a decade. This exclusive interview discusses her day, the state of the collection, and her hopes for the future.
The Interview Has Been Edited For Time And Clarity.
How Did You Come to Be The Curator of the Channing Pollock Collection?
Daniels: Well, you have to be a librarian first. It could have been anybody. Any librarian. That’s just a part of your job, but perhaps because of my own background, they gave me that…..me, I’m a teacher first. I taught English for 27 years at a high school. So, I know about plays and literature. in general, so I guess I might have been the only person here with that profile.
What Does Your Typical Day Look Like?
Daniels: It’s basically more intellectual then really doing the work. See, cause once upon a time it used to be viable....just like the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, but over the years, I guess having to due to with finances it was closed.....you can get information still. If you know that it’s there you can find it, but it’s not open. We’re trying to work it back into existence.
What Are Your Thoughts On the Africana Theater and Dance Collection?
Daniels: These materials [The African Theater and Dance Collection] that you’re using right now.....were given to me by Professor Selmon [Former Chair of Howard University's Department of Theater Arts]. The information there goes back about 30 years on Theater Arts. It’s a fantastic thing that’ happening cause we can move on from where we left off. I think we left off in the fifties. The kind of information that Joe Selmon gave me will be a continuation to [the] present. He gave me quite a lot of material. All the material you have downstairs [in the Africana Theater and Dance Collection] is from Joe Selmon. And I’m even wondering if we should call it the Joe Selmon collection. Just to keep his name alive.
What is the Most Interesting Thing In the Collection?
Daniels: The other day we found about 433 typed scripts. Typed on rice paper and bound with red leather with gold embossing, and a collection of melodramas for the end of the 19th century or early 20th [century].....that set of melodramas is priceless. Because it is the precourse of what they were doing on Broadway. That’s the precourse to the movies and those, except for the covers that are falling apart, typescripts are in pristine conditions. We have them going back to the 1800s. It’s a real good theater collection. I don’t know all the stuff there, cause like I said I’m not in theater, but there are musical scores, handbills going back in time to the early 1800s. Stuff in there from all of the places where [A.H.] Woods would have his plays shown. Like in Chicago, in Boston, here in D.C. in New York. There's stuff that even I don’t know what the art is. Stuff that needs to be opened. We had been given the Hattie McDaniel Oscar, but nobody could find it. But that's way before my time.