The Visual Culture Program (VCP) is an integral part of the Library Company’s public outreach. Initiatives include the exhibitions Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind, Ephemera Online, and Philadelphia on Stone: the First Fifty Years of Commercial Lithography in Philadelphia, 1828-1878.

VCP has hosted scholarly symposiums exploring early American advertising and the role of ephemera in our popular culture; an artist-in-residence intern creatively inspired by our juvenilia collections; and presentations by historians, curators, and artists on topics that include the visual politics of the woman suffrage movement, the history of scrapbooking, and the lithographic printing process.