Erica Armstrong Dunbar Named PAAH Director

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Erica Armstrong Dunbar, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, has been named the first Director of the Library Company's Program in African American History. Dunbar specializes in 19th-century African American and…

New Partnership with University of Georgia Press

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In a significant enhancement to the Program in African American History, the Library Company has formed a partnership with the University of Georgia Press to support Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900, a series of books focused on racial…

LCP Acquires Rare Reason Letterhead

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The Library Company has just purchased at auction a piece of letterhead engraved by Patrick Henry Reason, one of a very small number of commercially successful African American engravers. The stationery pictures the figure of a kneeling female…

Travelling Librarian Visits the Library Company

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Each year the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals bestows the English Speaking Union’s Travelling Librarian Award on a librarian in the UK to support travel to libraries and archives in the United States for the purpose…

Raymond Holstein Stereograph Collection Donated to the Library Company

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The Raymond Holstein Stereograph Collection consists of approximately 2000 Philadelphia images and represents five decades of collecting. Mr. Holstein and his wife began collecting stereographs in the early 1960s after finding approximately…

Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia Street Views from the Library Company on HistoryPin.com

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  The Library Company has contributed several early photographs of Philadelphia to HistoryPin, a site on which the public is invited to overlay historic images on present-day Google street views. Archives and individuals around the world…

Digitizing the Teitelman Collection of American Sunday-School Union Woodblocks and Imprints: A Pilot Project in Summer 2011

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This past summer, we completed a pilot project to catalog and digitize a sample of the woodblocks that came to the Library Company from the estate of S. Robert Teitelman. The Teitelman Collection of American Sunday-School Union Woodblocks and…

Photograph Collections from the Library Company now on PhillyHistory.org

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The Library Company has recently partnered with PhillyHistory.org, providing several photographic collections to its website. Run by the Philadelphia Department of Records, PhillyHistory.org includes photographs and maps from the Free Library…

Civil War Collections now on Flickr

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With the advent of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, the Library Company’s volunteer intern, Brett Tobias, has been busy uploading Civil War imagery from the McAllister Collection onto our Flickr website. He has selected…

Staff News

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Following her participation in two recently-completed grant projects, Associate Curator Erika Piola presented a paper and had an article published based on her work. At the recent Center for Historic American Visual Culture conference “Historical…

Cased Photograph Collection Now Online

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Thanks to a grant received from the Abington Foundation and the Ed Lee and Jean Campe Foundation, the Library Company digitized its entire cased photograph collection and is making it available to the public on ImPAC, our digital collections…

LCP Artist in Residence: Jennifer Levonian

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Thanks to a generous grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Heritage Philadelphia Program, the Library Company will be collaborating with artist Jennifer Levonian, who is creating an animated video to coincide with the upcoming exhibition John…

Video & Press

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If you're not able to visit the Library Company to see the exhibit, you can watch the finished animation on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/librarycompany/rebelliousbird Also, I'd like to share some recent press. This project was mentioned in the…

Reception & Talk!

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This Thursday we'll screen the animation and I'll discuss my creative process. Civil War re-enactor Wendy Ramsburg, the subject of my animation, will also speak. Please join us! Thursday, June 2, 2011—Reception at 5:30 p.m., Program at…

Finished

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1,676 still photographs of 42 painted backgrounds + dozens of puppets = 1 completed 9-minute animation!

Laurel Hill Cemetery Exhibition in the Daily News

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Guest Curator Aaron Wunsch points out the highlights of our current exhibition “Building a City of the Dead: The Creation and Expansion of Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery” in the following video courtesy of Jon Snyder of the Philadelphia…

Repeats

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I thought I'd show you some shots of my animation backdrops and puppets. To animate facial expressions, hand gestures, and other motion sequences, I make series of replaceable parts. I place each piece on a painted backdrop, snap a photo,…

Laying Out Exhibition Cases

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Reference Librarian Linda August and Curator of Prints and Photographs Sarah Weatherwax are collaborating on a small exhibition to accompany Jennifer Levonian's animated video. Women not only fought as men in the Civil War, they also concealed…

Busy

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March is flying by and I've been busy painting the backgrounds for my animation.

“Technology Versus Art”

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Join us on Wednesday, March 23 at 6:00 p.m. for “Technology Versus Art: The Early Daguerreotype’s Confounding Status in Philadelphia, 1839-1845" Sarah Gillespie, current William H. Helfand American Visual Culture Fellow at the Library…