Fascination with miniature and intricate pictures that move is eternal. Acquired by the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2020, the Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection comprises an unprecedented array of over 1,300 metamorphic works that fit in a person’s hand. Designed to be physically manipulated through flaps, pop ups, and the like to change their imagery, shape, and/or message, the pieces encompass various genres and are referred to by a variety of terms. They entail an assortment of different articles that although small in scale, are also profound in their influence as movable and moving (in all senses of the word) art before 1920. These images, like the GIF, meme, and AI depictions on electronic devices, permeated the visual matter that shaped the daily lives of generations of people before the 21st century.

While today social media primarily constitutes society’s hand-held moving imagery, producers of such materials for earlier generations created the works with a deceptively simple goal of enlivening a mundane piece of paper. Small-scale, sequential, and mosaic-like graphics served as mass means for visual messaging and learning, as political and advertising propaganda, and as windows into the everyday worlds and graphic design of their eras. The works in the Staples Collection and others of a comparable size and moving nature engage the hand, eye, and mind while also providing a historical lens on the media that function as communication, cultural, and technological devices for “serious fun.”

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Curated by Erika Piola