Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, April 4th, at 11:00 AM

In-Person Event

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays in January through April

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29th Annual Junto: A Collector’s Talk and Reception Featuring the Kathryn S. Alpert Collection of Women’s History Postcards and Ephemera

Thursday, April 10, 2025

Reception at 5:15 pm | Lecture at 6:00 pm

In-Person Event

Event is open to members at the Phillis Wheatley level and above, as well as those who make contributions to the Junto Campaign

Make a gift to the Library Company’s 29th Annual Junto in support of the Kathryn S. Alpert Collection of Women’s History Postcards and Ephemera and other Graphic Arts collections. We hope to raise $35,000 to support processing and digitization of the recently acquired Alpert collection and similar visual culture collections. Join us on April 10th for a special Junto event with a reception and presentation by collector and writer Kathryn S. Alpert. She’ll discuss her impressive collection that will foster the study of the lives of women before the mid-20th century and that offers exciting new avenues for the study of visual culture. For more information about the 29th Annual Junto, or to learn more about how to register for the event, please contact development@librarycompany.org or call 215-546-3181 ext. 118.

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Lecture by 2024-2025 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture with Dr. Caroline Culp

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Friday, May 2nd, 2025 at 1:30 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

The Sign in the Painting reconsiders the creative practice of Pennsylvania Quaker Edward Hicks (1780-1849), a successful sign and carriage painter working in Bucks County. In his spare time, Hicks created over sixty Peaceable Kingdom paintings, canvases depicting exotic animals coexisting in Biblical utopias. Scholars have too often divided attention between these two branches of Hicks’s artistic production—low and high, fine and folk—failing to see the crucial ties between them. By taking seriously the pedestrian rhetoric of the artist’s signboard painting with its intertwining of place, space, and local iconographies, Culp explores how the visual rhetoric found in signboard communication is foundational to Hicks’s easel paintings, which deployed the same site-specific communicative power.

Please join us for this recalibration of inherited histories offering new perspectives on the relationship between “high” and “low” art in American history, a discussion which aims to recover the conceptual complexity and alternative wisdom of artistic practices outside the academic tradition.

Caroline Culp is the Warren Family Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. She is a scholar of American art with specialties in colonial and early national painting and material culture, women artists, and the history of portraiture. Culp earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University and a B.A. in Art History and History (with honors) from Wake Forest University. Her scholarship appears in Panorama: The Journal of The Association of Historians of American Art, Journal18, and The Magazine ANTIQUES. She is the 2024-2025 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program