Pennsylvania Icons: State Treasures Telling the Story of the Commonwealth

Posted by on Apr 19, 2016 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania Icons: State Treasures Telling the Story of the Commonwealth   Pennsylvania Icons is a landmark exhibition at The State Museum of Pennsylvania that tells the story of the commonwealth and its people, places, industries, creations and events with more than 400 artifacts and specimens from the museum’s collection. The State Museum contains the largest and most comprehensive Pennsylvania history collection in the world, with a diverse array of objects...
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The Vision of William Penn

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Vision of William Penn “… that an example may be set up to the nations an holy experiment.” – William Penn   A few days after receiving his charter for Pennsylvania in the spring of 1681, William Penn sent off a letter to some Irish Quaker merchants, happily informing them of his good fortune, asking their assistance and explaining his motives for establish­ing a colony. Penn’s...
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Religious Freedom: Key to Diversity

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Religious Freedom: Key to Diversity “There can be no reason to persecute any man in this world about anything that belongs to the next.” – William Penn   To describe Pennsylvania’s re­ligious diversity is to present the history of its religious develop­ment. Although many other states be­came religiously heterogeneous during the nineteenth century, Pennsylvania was pluralistic even as a colony within...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Fancy That! “Capricious Fancy: Draping and Curtaining, 1790-1930,” an exhibition tracing the history of design sources for draping and curtaining American and European interiors during the span of nearly one hundred and fifty years, will open at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia on Monday, December 6 [1993]. On view will be a selection of rare books, prints, and trade catalogues drawn...
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Pippin

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pippin Artistic reputations are – much like the stock market – hard to assess, and harder yet to predict. Such is the case with the career of Horace Pippin (1888-1946), a self-taught African American painter who lived in West Chester in southeastern Pennsylvania. An artist of national standing by the early 1940s, Pippin had made a meteoric rise from the local renown of his Chester County...
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Explaining William Penn on the 350th Anniversary of His Birth: An Interview with Richard S. Dunn

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Explaining William Penn on the 350th Anniversary of His Birth: An Interview with Richard S. Dunn In his journal entry of December 29, 1667, noted seventeenth century English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) wrote that his young neighbor William Penn “has returned from Ireland a Quaker – or some very melancholy thing – that he cares for no company, nor comes into any.” For Pepys, who despised the noncon­formist Quakers, Penn’s reclusiveness was “a...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Hello, History! The former Chautauqua Lake Ice Company warehouse in Pittsburgh’s historic Strip District will come to life on Sunday, April 28 [1996], when it officially opens to the public as the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center. Renovated by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, which has been protecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Moore Is More As early as 1915, acclaimed American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) had discovered the artists and writers who were shaping what was coming to be known as the “new art.” Comments contained in her notebooks indicate her early grasp of the significance of the New York Armory Show of 1913, a benchmark in the American Modernist movement. In several lengthy letters to her...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf The Genius Belt: The Story of the Arts in Bucks County, Pennsylvania edited by George S. Bush James A. Michener Art Museum in association with The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996 (174 pages, cloth, $40.00; paper, $29.95) Bucks County had known artists as neighbors for years, but in this handsome and richly illustrated book, novelist and native son James A. Michener writes that two...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Kingdoms Come Edward Hicks (1780-1849), one of the best known of America’s folk painters, was a native and Lifelong resident of Bucks County, and a devoted Quaker preacher and missionary. His images of The Peaceable Kingdom, inspired by the Book of Isaiah’s prophetic vision of a peaceful world in which “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie with the...
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