Administrative/Biographical History
In the summer of 2005 DeKalb Mayor Frank van Buer asked Glen Gildemeister, Director of the Regional History Center at NIU, to chair the DeKalb Sesquicentennial Program Committee. During the following year the DeKalb Sesquicentennial Celebration staged over forty concerts, exhibits, and special events. To create a more permanent legacy the DeKalb Streetscapes Project came to life. The goal was to create a collection of images that depicted life in DeKalb at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Three judges, all professionals, selected about sixty of the images in this collection for display during the summer of the Sesquicentennial Celebration. The Nehring Gallery in downtown DeKalb hosted the exhibit alongside an exhibit of one hundred historical photographs. The winning images may be found together on CD 1 in Box 1. Glen Gildemeister curated both exhibits.
The collection represents the views of the fifteen people who created the images and, over time, we hope more photographers will be adding their views of life in DeKalb. With enough time and volunteers the DeKalb Streetscapes Collection will document the twenty-first century as well as Embree does the twentieth.
