Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin’s Public Library

To be an engaged citizen you need to be visually literate. Scholarship is more open to the idea that there's a lot of value in images. Something that may have just been a cartoon that ran once in Harper's Weekly in 1863, those are really important objects to help us gauge like what was the popular sentiment at the time. The full title, I just have to do it, is Imperfect History Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin's Public Library. Imperfect History is being held in honor of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Graphic Arts Department. And we didn't want to just do a greatest hits. What we want to show is what the role of the curator is, the evolution of the collection that the curator is stewarding, as well as the imperfections of the curator and those collections. We wanted the exhibition to be more of an exploration of how as a society can we learn to read graphics like we have all learned to read texts. We have over 100,000 items here in the Graphic Arts Department. Many of our materials date to the 19th century, but we do have items such as maps that date as early as the 16th century. However, we no longer have the first graphic item that we found a record of coming in. And we're going to represent that in the exhibition by a empty frame. Most of our materials that depicted women or depicted African Americans were not being produced by those groups. Something that I really appreciate about seeing the evolution is seeing how we've made a concerted effort to try and source material that were produced by African American lithographers or photographers. And we, of course, have a lot of materials that, for instance, when it comes to race or gender, depict a lot of stereotypes, like a trade card that's advertising a soap business. And you'd think, oh, what can be so socially charged about soap? But a lot of the trade cards in the 19th century that were promoting normal day-to-day things employed racist caricatures to do so. Nowadays, we can recognize that material on a wholesale level as really negative. Also, the recognition that different people bring different preconceived ideas to looking at visuals. And it doesn't mean that I'm right and you're wrong. It just means that you can look at it in many, many different ways. I think that is one of the themes that we're trying to tease out in the exhibition. I am curating two sections within the exhibition. One is having me pick out a few objects, and then for the three of us to each write labels for those objects without seeing what the others are writing. So then that way, when we come together and show each other the labels, we kind of see the differences and the similarities in how we interpreted them. We have a digital catalog, which does a similar concept, where we had individuals who are curators, studio artists, and art historians look at the same three images and write a catalog entry to describe this image. And so that's a part of the Imperfect History exhibition. Again, kind of getting at the same idea that everyone brings their own knowledge and background and perspective to looking at something. I think it's the curator's job to really do the work of helping audiences understand why were racist tropes being used to advertise laundry soap. But also trying to look and anticipate how we potentially can guide new scholarship. I'm hoping that people will think about like, hey, this is how I'm looking at it today, but also think about like, hey, possibly this is what someone 200 years ago was thinking when they were looking at that material. I'm really hoping that people can start to think a little bit critically about their own experience of space in Philadelphia. We can't just be spoon-fed one narrative without thinking about others. So that's kind of what I'm hoping people come away with. I want people to have a much broader sense of why we should care about all of these visuals. Visual literacy, I think, is a good phrase to describe what we're hoping to promote.