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

,
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

,
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

,
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

,
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

,
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

,
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

,
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!

,
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

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

Laurel Hill Cemetery Exhibition in the Daily News

,
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

,
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

,
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

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

“Technology Versus Art”

,
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…

“Revisiting Rural Cemeteries”

,
Join us on Wednesday, March 16th, 1:00 - 5:45 p.m. for a Symposium Sponsored by Library Company of Philadelphia, the Laurel Hill Cemetery Company, and the Program in Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania In the three decades prior…

Wendy in Disguise

,
As I continued to read about the topic of women soldiers in the Civil War, I learned that there are a number of women that disguise themselves as men to portray male soldiers in Civil War re-enactments. This discovery led me to the panhandle…

Choosing a Topic

,
When I began to visit the Library Company’s Print Room to view the McAllister Collection of Civil War ephemera, I was both fascinated and overwhelmed by the collection and the scope of the subject. Not only did the Civil War seem much…

Stewardship Program

,
Become a Steward of the collections of the Library Company and sponsor your own piece of history! Through our Stewardship Program, you can support the purchase of interesting and important rare books, pamphlets, prints, and photographs.…

Illustrating the Civil War

,
Jennifer recently visited the Library Company to look at some of our printed material, including Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Leslie’s was a heavily illustrated American literary and news serial founded in 1855. It portrayed the…

Introductions

,
  I’m Jennifer Levonian, a Philadelphia artist working in painting and cut-paper animation. The above self-portrait is a still from an animation I made last winter. Currently, I’m making an animation inspired by the Library Company’s…