The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage : Blog

In Pursuit of the Paranormal

2012-01-27T16:23:23+00:00

by Richard W. Fink II, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Sketch Club Cliveden: Home of the Chew family and site of the 1777 Battle of Germantown. Spirits of departed soliders are believed to remain on the property. In the fall of 2010 I received a “Scholars in the Interpretation of History” award from HPP. The grant supported development of public programs that explored connections between historical ghost stories, contemporary spiritual practices, and the power of place. While there was no clear expectation for what these public programs should entail, I was asked to create a project that went “beyond predictable ghost tours.” I began the project by researching the commercial aspects of the supernatural throughout history. It quickly became apparent that historic sites have been profiting off the paranormal since the Civil War era. At the Germantown Historical Society, in folders marked “ghost stories” and “haunted houses,” I uncovered a...

Hidden Stories Part 2

2012-01-19T13:26:13+00:00

by Cornelia S. King, Curator of Women’s History, Library Company of Philadelphia I was intrigued to be invited to join a field trip sponsored by Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP) and the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative (PTI), which I described to my colleagues at the Library Company as a mash-up between people like us (special collections librarians and archivists) and people in the performing arts. I imagined wonderful outcomes; wouldn’t it be great to collaborate on programming that would re-create the singing, dancing, and theatrical staging that is documented by the printed sheet music, playbills, and programmes in our collection? Years ago we’d had such a program, with the performers singing 19th-century temperance songs, even though our event was not “dry," a fact that amused everyone. Our first stop on the field trip was the Wagner Free Institute. The Wagner is a stunning place that evokes the intellectual rigors that characterized the...

Jan Ramirez on Creating the National September 11 Memorial Museum

2012-01-05T19:23:06+00:00

by Sarah Biemiller, former Senior Program Associate for The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage I attended Jan Ramirez’s lecture here at the Center on October 20, 2011. She came here to talk about the intricacies of designing the National September 11 Memorial Museum. The museum will consist of 110,000 square feet of exhibition space, located “within the archaeological heart” of the World Trade Center site. Using archives, personal narratives and authentic artifacts, the museum will “provide a link to the events of 9/11, while presenting intimate stories of loss, compassion, reckoning, and recovery that are central to telling the story of the attacks and the aftermath.” Ms. Ramirez’s lecture was raw. It was profound. But first and foremost, it was sensitive and thoughtful. Obviously the subject matter is delicate. She emphasized how they want to create a museum that honors all those who perished that day, as well as...

Announcing the 2011 HPP Triple I Awards

2011-12-05T18:09:07+00:00

This program was formerly known as HPP Scholars in the Interpretation of History Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP) of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2011 HPP Awards for Interpretive Inquiry and Investigation. This professional development opportunity supports individual practitioners in the investigation of imaginative projects in public history. These small grants support experimental interpretive research and projects that bring history alive by: • connecting the present to the past in engaging, imaginative, and meaningful ways, • responding to audience/community interests or needs, • demonstrating a complex understanding and presentation of history. There are four recipients this year, an unprecedented number. Triple I Award recipients are selected by Heritage Philadelphia Program senior staff with the assistance of an outside reviewer. Jebney Lewis—We Make the City Lewis will develop and construct a small exhibit with a focus on the intersection of Broad and...

Hidden Stories

2011-12-01T18:37:58+00:00

By Adrienne Mackey, Swim Pony Performing Arts I was recently lucky enough to spend the day on a PTI and HPP joint field trip called “Hidden Stories.” Our task: take a “journey to explore seldom-seen aspects of historic collections and sites.” Beyond uniting theater professionals and public historians there were few mandated outcomes of the trip, but many opportunities for question, exploration and cross-pollination. I appreciated that freedom - to simply take in, to process in whatever way seemed appropriate and to let a sheet of ragtime music or an angry taxidermy squirrel strike me as they may. It was overwhelming and a little awe inspiring to walk into the storage facility of the Atwater Kent and know that every single object, and there were hundreds of thousand in view, held many lifetimes worth of stories and that I was standing next to a man who simply by asking “What’s...

Picturing History

2011-11-22T18:07:16+00:00

by Andrea (Ang) Reidell, Education Specialist, National Archives at Philadelphia History is full of dramatic moments. But how that moment is documented—and by whom—impacts how (or if) an event is remembered. Visual records are a particularly compelling type of source, as they tend to draw people into historical events in ways that text documents do not—at least at first glance. But what if an event was never visually documented? How do we as public historians create engaging exhibits and programs that are visually compelling when we have no original visual sources? For the team from the National Archives at Philadelphia, participants in the HPP initiative “No Idea Is Too Ridiculous,” the answer was to work with an artist to create a visual representation based on written primary sources. A complex task, yes, but the result was remarkable. Artist Alina Josan’s painting—which can be viewed here at the online version of...

Inside Jenny Sabin’s Greenhouse at the APS Museum

2011-11-11T16:43:43+00:00

Visitors to the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum still have a chance to see Pew Fellow Jenny Sabin’s eco-conscious greenhouse, which will remain in the museum’s garden between now and December 9 as part of The Greenhouse Projects, happening through the end of 2011. Back in September, we provided a glimpse of the greenhouse and its surrounding projects through images and text. Now, 2011 Pew Fellow Matthew Suib and Aaron Igler of Greenhouse Media (no relation!) have created a video walk-through of Sabin’s structure, in which you can get a better sense of its intricate details and technical beauty. Selections from Kyle Bartlett’s sound installation, Chaotic Menagerie, play throughout the video. This is the same soundtrack visitors hear at the physical site of the greenhouse, made up of sounds and melodies that evoke themes from the museum’s concurrent French natural history exhibition. As a bonus, check out the APS Museum’s...

Making Plays Out of History

2011-11-08T14:15:31+00:00

by Nathan Wainstein and Joshua Lynch, two students from the workshop In March 2011, HPP awarded Philadelphia Young Playwrights a Discovery Grant for Re-Vision: A Summer Theater Making Intensive. This two-week intensive program intertwined history, architecture, playwriting, and performance for Philadelphia high school students. MAKING PLAYS OUT OF HISTORY: REFLECTIONS ON THE 2011 RE-VISION RETREAT WITH PHILADELPHIA YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS Under the guidance of professional theatre artists David Bradley and Justin Jain, over a dozen student playwrights from area high schools and a coalition of actors, artists, writers, and historians came together for Philadelphia Young Playwrights Re-Vision playwriting retreat that was held on July 18–29. Collaboratively, we all explored the process of revision, as it takes place in cities, streets, texts, historical narratives, and, of course, plays. Here are a few of the things we students took away. History Through a Different Lens How does history come down to us? How...

Arctic Social Media Program Project Diary

2011-11-07T15:42:33+00:00

by Beth Houting In February 2010, HPP awarded the Chester County Historical Society a Discovery Grant to work with Canary Productions+Design to produce a new web tool to help promote their exhibition, Chilling Reality: Chester County’s Arctic Explorer. Pursuant is their journey. Photo: Jeanette Arctic Exploring Expedition. 1879–81. Photo courtesy of the Naval Historical Foundation. Arctic Social Media Program Project Diary February 26, 2010 On the 23rd, we had our first meeting with Mason. It was a bit discouraging that we could not have our whole team here. Rob (the curator) could not come up from DC till Friday, when Mason was not available. The collection team (Ellen and Andrea) also got called away, though Ellen joined us at the end of the meeting. I was not sure how much we could accomplish without having content people there. Maybe that is old-fashioned of me. I certainly felt unimaginative at first during the...

Heritage Philadelphia Program takes Ridiculous Ideas to AASLH

2011-09-29T17:47:32+00:00

Earlier this month, Bill and I attended the annual mameeting of the American Association for State and Local History in Richmond, Virginia. I was fortunate to be able to chair a session on our project No Idea is Too Ridiculous, accompanied by the fabulous Kathy McLean, principal of Independent Exhibitions, and three project participants: Matt Shoemaker, Director of Digital Collections and Systems at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Kristin Qualls, Collections and Exhibit Specialist at The Franklin Institute; and Laura Keim, Curator at Wyck. We got off to a truly ridiculous start, when just as we were about to begin the session, a circuit blew and we lost power to our laptops, projector and microphones. But the A/V techs came to our rescue, and we did the session as we'd planned (without needing to substitute interpretive dance for the slides we'd prepared). To a packed room, Kathy talked about how easy it...