PHILADELPHIA, PA – This July and August, Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library will offer an exciting line-up of exhibitions, special events, Hands-On Tours, Gallery Talks, and family-friendly programming. Summer will bring the opening of two new exhibitions featuring visual art, literature and historical objects. The exhibition Dreadful Things Happen: The Brothers Grimm and Maurice Sendak, opening Wednesday, July 7, examines illustrator Maurice Sendak’s perspective on the folktales popularized by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. In Westward Ho! The Lure and Lore of the American West, opening Wednesday, August 4, the Rosenbach journeys to the iconic American West through an exhibition featuring dime novels, photographs, guides, maps and more.
The Rosenbach will also offer the new Thematic House Tour Are You For Real? and a full roster of the museum’s popular Hands-On Tours, inviting visitors to experience the museum’s collection up-close and in an intimate setting. A full summer schedule with brief program descriptions follows below.
Set within two historic 1865 townhouses in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, the Rosenbach Museum & Library is located at 2008-2010 Delancey Place and is open Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and groups of 10 or more, $5 for students and children ages 5-18, and free for children under 5.
DREADFUL THINGS HAPPEN: THE BROTHERS GRIMM AND MAURICE SENDAK
For nearly two hundred years, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been associated with classic folktales and fairy tales from Hansel and Gretel and Rumpelstiltskin, to Snow White and Cinderella. Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has been an admirer of those stories all his life. The exhibition Dreadful Things Happen: The Brothers Grimm and Maurice Sendak(July 7 thru November 7, 2010) revisits the Grimms’ beguiling stories, brought to life in vivid detail through Sendak’s illustrations. From witches and wicked parents to Sendak’s own Wild Things, 200 years of the Grimms’ stories and their influence will delight kids and adults alike.
Objects on display in Dreadful Things Happen include:
- Illustrations by Maurice Sendak for such well-known Grimm stories as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Hansel and Gretel, and The Fisherman and His Wife
- 1820s etchings by George Cruikshank – English satirist, printmaker, and the first illustrator of the Grimms in English – depicting such outlandish characters as giants, elves, long-nosed princes, witches, and other Grimm personae
- Letters from Lore Segal, the translator of Maurice Sendak’s Grimm collection The Juniper Tree (1973); Sendak often scribbled notes alongside Segal’s translations in an effort to pinpoint which part of the tale to pictorialize and why (a topic explored in the exhibition)
- Two volumes of a 1853 American edition of The Brothers Grimm tales featuring Victorian illustrations by Edward Wehnert
Dreadful Things Happenis curated by Patrick Rodgers, Traveling Exhibitions Coordinator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
WESTWARD HO! THE LURE AND LORE OF THE AMERICAN WEST
The West looms large in the American imagination. In the exhibition Westward Ho! The Lure and Lore of the American West (August 4 – November 28, 2010), the Rosenbach Museum & Library will draw from its collection to examine the history and mythos of the West and its cast of characters, with a special emphasis on the thrilling dime novel adventures that blanketed the country beginning in 1860.
For nineteenth-century Americans, the American West was an idea as much as a place. This West was everywhere in American culture, even for those who never left the East. Americans read about the West in countless dime novels and supposedly factual guidebooks and travelers’ tales. They watched Wild West shows and visited displays of Western exotica. Politicians exhorted them to fulfill America’s Manifest Destiny to expand across the continent. And, of course, millions of Americans struck out to experience the West firsthand.
The materials featured in Westward Ho! juxtapose the romanticized descriptions offered up by eastern writers with the actual experiences of western pioneers to reveal a vision of the West that was shared by those who ventured there and those who only imagined it from afar. Objects on display include:
- The dime novel Buffalo Bill’s last scalp, a thrilling story of real life among the Redskins (c. 1872) featuring the larger-than-life Western character Buffalo Bill, which is displayed along with a book co-authored by the real Buffalo Bill
- Henry I. Simpson’s Emigrant’s Guide to the Gold Mines (1848), an early guide to the California gold mines promising unbelievable wealth, but written by a man who’d never been there
- A souvenir photo of the museum’s co-founder, Philip Rosenbach, dressed as a cowboy
- The Mohawk Queen, or, The partisan’s plot(1874), William Henry Manning’s thrilling tale of an Indian princess who turns out to be a kidnapped English aristocrat
In conjunction with the exhibition, the
Gallery Talk Yippy ti yi yo: The Myth of the American West (Thursday, August 26, 6pm) will present a forum to discuss dime novels, emigrant guides, artwork and the powerful lure of the West with exhibit curator
Karen Schoenewaldt.. The
Wild West Hands-On Tour (July 11, 23; August 8, 13, 3pm) invites visitors to read and handle travelogues and maps of travel routes and settlements.
Westward Ho! The Lure and Lore of the American West is curated byKatherine Haas, Assistant Curator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, andKaren Schoenewaldt, Museum Registrar.
NEW HOUSE TOUR & HANDS-ON TOURS
The new Thematic House Tour Are You For Real? (thru July; Wednesdays, 6-7pm; Saturdays, 3-4pm) will explore the concept of authenticity and include forgeries, copies, original pieces and more from the museum’s collections. Thematic house tours offer a new look at stories behind objects under a chosen theme and provide visitors with a unique way to experience the museum’s historic house.
The Rosenbach will offer a full roster of the museum’s popular Hands-On Tours (various dates) exploring an array of subjects, with two new tours debuting this summer. The new tour Book Illustration: Worth a Thousand Words (Sunday, August 1, 3pm) examines the technology of book illustration, fromilluminated manuscripts to photographs, with a close look at talented book artists Jean-Baptiste Le Prince,William Blake, and George Cruikshank. In the wine-infused tour Besotted: Wine and Words(Sunday, July 11, 3pm; Friday, August 20, 3pm), visitors are invited tohandle intoxicating artifacts and rare books that chronicle the history of wine and explore its role within literature, including Shakespeare’s sherry from Henry IV, Leopold Bloom’s burgundy in Ulysses, a wine-stained Passover Haggadah, and George Cruikshank’s anti-alcohol prints.
A full summer schedule with brief program descriptions follows below.
SCHEDULE OF PROGRAMS & EVENTS
Where: The Rosenbach Museum & Library
2008-2010 Delancey Place, Philadelphia, PA 19103
Hours: Tuesday: 12-5pm; Wednesday & Thursday: 12-8pm
Friday: 12-5pm; Saturday & Sunday: 12-6pm
Closed Mondays and National Holidays
Admission: $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, $5 for students and free for children under 5.
Information: (215) 732-1600or visit www.rosenbach.org.
All events are free with museum admission, unless otherwise noted.
Thematic House Tour – Are You For Real?
Wednesdays – June 30, July 7, July 14, July 21, 2010, 6-7pm
Saturdays – July 3, July 10, July 17, July 24, 2010, 3-4pm
Thematic house tours offer a new look at stories behind objects under a chosen theme. What could be more counter-intuitive than a museum asking visitors to consider the authenticity of their collections? On this tour, we will discuss the concept of authenticity as demonstrated in objects on display in the Rosenbach brothers’ historic townhouse. Why would a book collector knowingly purchase a forgery? What does it actually mean when a painting is credited to the school of an established artist? How can a copy tell us more about the cultural impact of the original object than the original? Come join in on this fun and lively discussion and tour.
Exhibition – Dreadful Things Happen: The Brothers Grimm and Maurice Sendak
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 – Sunday, November 7, 2010
For nearly two hundred years, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been associated with classic folktales from “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” to “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” Maurice Sendak has been an admirer of those stories all his life. From his 1973 illustrations for the collection of Grimm tales called The Juniper Tree to his 1996 costume designs for the opera version of Hansel and Gretel, Sendak has grappled with the mix of funny, cruel, strange, and ancient elements that mingle so successfully in stories by the Grimms. “That’s why the children loved them,” said Sendak, “because they were real life. Dreadful things happen. What more could you want?” This exhibition will revisit the Grimms’ beguiling stories, brought to life in vivid detail through Sendak’s illustrations, and complemented by George Cruikshank’s 1820s etchings of the tales, as well as a two-volume 1853 American edition. From witches and wicked parents to Sendak’s own Wild Things, 200 years of the Grimms’ stories and their influence will delight kids and adults alike.
Exhibition – Westward Ho! The Lure and Lore of the American West
Wednesday, August 4, 2010 – Sunday, November 28, 2010
The West looms large in the American imagination. A place of limitless possibility, the West was an always-available stage for reinvention and new beginnings. The frontier offered a proving ground for character and a place where everything, from the scenery to the personalities, was larger than life. This exhibition draws from across the Rosenbach collections to examine the history and mythos of the West and its cast of characters: the trappers and treaty commissioners, soldiers and settlers, farmers and fur traders, and the Native Americans whose culture and land were lost.
Gallery Talk– Yippy ti yi yo: The Myth of the American West
Thursday, August 26, 6pm
What is it about the West? Romantic notions of the Far West continued long after the West was explored and settled, its original inhabitants decimated, and the buffalo hunted to near extinction. Over two centuries the nostalgia for the vanished West has spawned film, fine art, fiction, and fashions. In this gallery talk we will look at dime novels, emigrant guides, and artwork and talk about the powerful lure of the West. This talk is led by Karen Schoenewaldt, Registrar and Westward Ho! exhibit curator.
Hands-On Tours
Hands-On Tours allow you to get in touch with historic objects from our collection, literally, as you turn the pages of a rare book or test the weight of a delicate teacup or hefty tankard. Hands-On Tours are available every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday at 3pm. No RSVP required, but space is limited. Free with museum admission.
For tour descriptions, visit http://rosenbach.org/learn/programs/handsontours.
Sunday, June 27 – An unblushing impudence: the meek and the murderous in 18th- and 19th-century American women’s history
Wednesday, June 30 – Marianne Moore, Modernist Poet
Friday, July 2 – Founding Fathers
Wednesday, July 7 – Founding Fathers
Friday, July 9 – Morning, Noon, and Night in Early Philadelphia
Sunday, July 11 – Besotted: Wine and Words
Wednesday, July 14 – Tourists & Their Travels
Friday, July 16 – Wild West
Sunday, July 18 – Founding Fathers
Wednesday, July 21 – Philadelphia Artists
Friday, July 23 – Wild West
Sunday, July 25 – Marianne Moore, Modernist Poet
Wednesday, July 28 – Founding Fathers
Friday, July 30 – Love Letters
Sunday, August 1 – Book Illustration: Worth a Thousand Words
Wednesday, August 4 – Shakespeare
Friday, August 6 – An unblushing impudence: the meek and the murderous in 18th- and 19th-century American women’s history
Sunday, August 8 – Wild West
Wednesday, August 11 – An unblushing impudence: the meek and the murderous in 18th- and 19th-century American women’s history
Friday, August 13 – Wild West
Sunday, August 15 – Shakespeare
Wednesday, August 18 – Morning, Noon, and Night in Early Philadelphia
Friday, August 20 – Besotted: Wine and Words
Sunday, August 22 – Founding Fathers
Wednesday, August 25 – James Joyce & Irish Authors
Friday, August 27 – Shakespeare
Sunday, August 29 – Shakespeare
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