Description
Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731 as a subscription-based lending library, The Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP), is an internationally-recognized research library housing more than 500,000 rare books, manuscripts, prints and photographs, related to American and global history before 1900. The holdings cover a wide range of knowledge fields, from science, technology, and medicine, to natural history and the arts.
The LCP formally created its Print and Photograph Department in 1971 to manage and share 100,000 graphic artworks, with particular strengths in works by Philadelphia printmakers, photographers, and artists, and images of the city and its culture. In 2008, the LCP initiated a Visual Culture Program to document and disseminate information on the historic visual materials and to promote visual literacy through acquisitions, research fellowships, conferences, and public programs.
The LCP now proposes a collection-based exhibition titled Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts at Benjamin Franklin’s Library , which will offer a candid exploration of the social dynamics and cultural biases that shaped this long-standing graphics collection. Slated to run from March through October of 2021, it will address how the collection came to be what it is, and how interpretation of the graphic holdings has changed over time. This project will be one of several intended to deepen the LCP’s understanding of its collections in advance of the institution’s 300 th anniversary in 2031.
Imperfect History will embrace a wide range of objects including: Revolutionary-era political cartoons devised by Benjamin Franklin; pastels and drawings collected by the artist and antiquarian Pierre Eugène du Simitière; Philadelphia landscape designs; and photographic street views and portraits. Scholars from varied disciplines will offer new perspectives on why objects featured in the exhibition were created and/or collected.
The Imperfect History project will also produce an online version of the exhibition, a related publication, visual literacy seminar, and symposium. It will be overseen by Erika Piola, Associate Curator and Director of the Visual Culture Program, and supported by a term curatorial-training position for a rising scholar of American graphic arts. The proposed grant would underwrite the term curatorial-training position, and all expenses associated with the exhibitions and publication.
