Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, October 6, 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 of the United States and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about collection materials on display in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available on First Fridays from October through March (excluding January):

Friday, October 6, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, November 3, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, December 1, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, February 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, March 1, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

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Queering the Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert

Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Dr. Christopher Looby

October 18th, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual Event | Free

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Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael A. Verney

A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic

Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828
A book talk by Dr. Allison M. Stagg

October 20, 2023
1:30pm ET
Virtual Event | Free

Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists. This book presents all known American political caricatures created in the country’s transformative early years between 1789 and 1828. It examines the caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Prints of a New Kind fills a large void in early American scholarship, one that has escaped through art historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context. Dr. Allison M. Stagg was the 2017-2018 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture Fellow and this book talk will focus on presenting some of the caricature and ephemeral objects from the Library Company’s collection that are included in Prints of a New Kind.

Dr. Allison M. Stagg is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century American and British visual culture. She received her PhD from University College London and her post-doctoral research has been supported by grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She has published widely on the subject of American historical caricature, with recent articles in Print Quarterly and Imprint: The Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society. She was previously the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art History at the Freie Universität of Berlin and is currently a research associate in the Department of Architectural and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.

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Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

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The Complexities of Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait
A guest lecture by art historian Jennifer Y. Chuong

October 25, 2023
1:00pm ET
Virtual Event | Free

 In the fall of 1773, the Senegambian-born, American-enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley was the first Black woman to publish a book in the transatlantic world. In addition to thirty-nine poems authored by Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, features an engraved frontispiece portrait of the author. In tandem with Wheatley’s poetry, this portrait was meant to attest to the material existence of an enslaved person who, by virtue of her intelligence, erudition, and imagination, exploded slavery’s foundational claim that enslaved persons were objects to be bought and sold. Dr. Jennifer Chuong’s talk explores both the ways in which the portrait supports these aims and the ways in which it undercuts them. Understanding its doubled representation—of Wheatley as a person deserving of freedom, on the one hand, and of Wheatley as a person whose race precludes full subjective recognition, on the other—provides a key to understanding her vexed reception, from her time to ours. Join us for the culminating event in our year of programming to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Wheatley’s seminal work. 

Dr. Jennifer Y. Chuong is an art historian whose research centers on the art, architecture, and material culture of the transatlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries as they relate to histories of environment and race. She holds a PhD and MA in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, an MS in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelors of Architecture from Cornell University. In her work Dr. Chuong prioritizes the intelligence of makers and making in order to expand our understanding of what art is, and who makes it. In addition to the frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley, recent publications have focused on the tacit contributions of revolutionary printers, the nature of early American veneer furniture, the appeal and meaning of “gloss” in 19th-century America, as well as the surfaces of Alex Katz’s artworks. 

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Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, November 3, 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 of the United States and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about collection materials on display in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available on First Fridays from November through March (excluding January):

Friday, November 3, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, December 1, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, February 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, March 1, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

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292nd Annual Dinner Featuring Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust

Thursday, November 9, 2023, at 5:30 pm

Presented In Person and Virtually

The Down Town Club, 600 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA

For almost 300 years, the Library Company has gathered annually to celebrate our steadfast commitment to learning. This year, we are pleased to be featuring Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust. She will be discussing her latest book, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up in Midcentury.

Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, is an accomplished author and scholar. In addition to Dr. Faust’s illustrious history at Harvard (President, 2007-2018; founding dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2001-2007) and in the history department at University of Pennsylvania, she is the distinguished author of six books, including most recently This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), which chronicles the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of nineteenth-century Americans. It was awarded the 2009 Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s 2009 American History Book Prize, and was recognized by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.”

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Fireside Chat with Dr. Katlyn Marie Carter

Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions

Thursday, November 16, 2023
7:00 p.m. ET
Virtual Event | Free

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, December 1, 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 of the United States and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about collection materials on display in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available on First Fridays from December through March (excluding January):

Friday, December 1, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, February 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, March 1, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

REGISTER

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, February 2, 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 of the United States and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about collection materials on display in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available on First Fridays in February and March:

Friday, February 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, March 1, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

REGISTER

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, March 1, 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 of the United States and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about collection materials on display in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. This is the final month of our Fall-Winter First Friday tours; however, our Spring-Summer First Friday tours will start up in April. Please stay tuned for a link to register for those tours as well.

REGISTER