The Sign in the Painting: Site-Specificity in Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdoms

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