Enfilade

Two upcoming online events from the Visual Culture Program of The Library Company of Philadelphia:

Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828
A book talk by Dr. Allison Stagg
Friday, 20 October 2023, 1.30pm ET

Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists. It examines the caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them.

Allison M. Stagg is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century American and British visual culture and has published widely on the subject of American historical caricature. She was the Library Company 2017–18 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture.

More information and registration details are available here»

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The Complexities of Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait
A guest lecture by Dr. Jennifer Chuong
Wednesday, 25 October 2023, 1.00pm ET

In the fall of 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first Black woman to publish a book in the transatlantic world. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral features an engraved frontispiece portrait of the author. This portrait aimed to portray an enslaved person who, by virtue of her intelligence, erudition, and imagination, exploded slavery’s foundational claim that enslaved persons were objects to be bought and sold. This talk explores how the portrait both supports and undercuts this aim.

Jennifer Y. Chuong is an art historian whose research centers on the art, architecture, and material culture of the transatlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries as they relate to histories of environment and race.

More information and registration details are available here»