The Rosenbach Museum & Library began the artist-in-residence program in 1998. Here is an abbreviated list of Artist Projects to date (not in perfect chronological order):

• Tristan Lowe, artist installation

The Mad Hatter: An Update (1998).

In conjunction with the exhibition The Advent of Alice: Lewis Carroll Centenary.

For our exhibition celebrating the Lewis Carroll centenary, we invited local sculptor and installation artist Tristan Lowe to create a temporary installation in our old conference room. The then Director of Education, Bill Adair wanted to work with Tristan because his work had often dealt with children’s stories, the culture of children, the mythologies of childhood, etc. For us, he created a giant re-circulating tea contraption – that he dubbed “the new and improved mad hatter.” We had the installation up and on display for four or five days and brought visitors, including some school groups but mostly adults, in to see it.

Tristan did a lecture about his work one evening, and unveiled and talked about this piece– and we had about 50 adults – mostly people from the Philly arts community came to this event. We got our feet wet figuratively with this project – we liked his interpretation of the Alice stories, and we learned that we could draw a diverse, young audience from the arts community here if we did the right kind of programming. We also got our feet wet literally with this project. At one point during this process the giant balloon burst spewing tea throughout the museum.

 

• Sebastienne Mundheim, performance

The Potable Joyce: A Watered Down Version of Ulysses (1998).

The Rosenbach Museum & Library commissioned Sebastienne Mundheim to create an educational program for elementary students based on the museum’s collection. James Joyce’s manuscript of Ulysses is one of the museum’s most significant holdings. “A Potable Joyce” was developed as the performance component of a larger educational program that sought to introduce students to the value of the manuscript as a document or artifact of the artist/author’s process. The performance introduces the manuscript, the process of writing, a little Joyce and Homer, as well as some new vocabulary. It also opens up discussion about how writers use metaphor as a literary tool. Through discussion and exercise, the program explores how an author collects experiences and images, in order to make his own life experience richer, and in order to build tools for expression. The larger education program includes hands-on art making, discussion, and writing. This larger program was originally conceived and implemented in collaboration with the Fleisher Art Memorial and local schools.

“A Potable Joyce” has had many runs. In 2004 the Irish Ministry of Arts and Culture invited and sponsored the show to tour 3 cities in Ireland for 5 weeks. It has been part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2002, Bloomsday Weekends 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and was featured in the Excellence in Arts and Education Celebration at the House of Representatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 2001.

 

• Headlong Dance Theater, performance

Ulysses: Sly Uses of a book by James Joyce (1999).

Commissioned by the Rosenbach Museum & Library for their Bloomsday celebration, the dance investigates Joycean theories of narrative - while telling a sad love story. Premiered off-site at the Drake Theater.

 

• Rob Redei, composer

The Adventures of Manjiro: A Musical (1999)

In conjunction with the exhibition Drifting: Nakahama Manjiro’s Tale of Discovery

An opera for children based on the Manjiro manuscript. This piece was later invited to travel in Japan.

 

• Gabriel Martinez, artist installation in the Historic House

The Bachelor (2000)

In conjunction with the exhibition At Home: The Art of Daily Life on DeLancey Street

We invited Gabriel Martinez, a local photographer and installation artist to create a piece in response to this exhibition about the Rosenbach brothers and their lives as voracious collectors when they lived in the house next door. We asked Martinez because his work is very much about male identity, definitions of masculinity, the culture of dandyism, etc. Martinez created an installation in a period room across the hall from the special exhibition entitled The Bachelor. The Rosenbach brothers were both bachelors, and were Jewish, were obsessed with objects and constructed and reflected their identities through objects. Gabe’s installation was about a man that he knew who was also a Jewish bachelor obsessed with objects, but whose sensibilities couldn’t have been more different from the Rosenbachs’. So Gabe filled one of our period rooms with these 20th-century objects.

 

• Eileen Neff, photo installation

The Ghost of Marianne Moore (2000)

In conjunction with the exhibition Sitting Pretty: Photographs of Marianne Moore

• Teresa Jaynes, artist installation

• Candy Depew and Martha McDonald, performance and artist installation

BANG! Contemporary Artists Collide with the Collections (2001)

Red Maids: women’s history

Petals from the Same Flower

Three Philadelphia-based artists were invited to create original works that interact with and react to the Rosenbach’s collections of rare books, manuscripts and fine and decorative arts. BANG! Featured two contemporary art installations in the Rosenbach’s period rooms. The first, Red Maids, was filled with over 120 beautifully embroidered handmade red skirts suspended from the ceiling. Images and text from the Rosenbach collections exploring female identity and sexuality were integrated into the installation, including a first edition of DeFoe’s

Moll Flanders, Bram Stoker’s manuscript notes for Dracula, portrait miniatures and decorative arts objects. The second installation, Petals from the Same Flower, was a multi-disciplinary project involving mezzo-soprano, writer, and performance artist Martha McDonald and installation artist Candy Depew. Both artists infused historical motifs borrowed from the Baroque era into their work. Depew, a ceramicist, mined the Rosenbach’s architecture and decorative arts collections for production of a new “period room.” McDonald, designed a performance/tour of the museum incorporating pieces from Baroque opera.

BANG! Was conceived by art historian Janet Kaplan, and Bill Adair, the Rosenbach’s Director of Education.

 

• Ellen Rosenholtz, zine

Strawberry’s Rosenbacchanal (2003)

We commissioned comic artist Ellen Rosenholtz to create a series of informal publications, or ‘zines, about the Rosenbach brothers and their collections. The ‘zine celebrates the Rosenbach founders and their passion for collecting objects of creativity and imagination. This publication is targeted to a young adult audience – college students and people in their twenties and thirties. Published in large quantities – 10,000 copies– it was distributed in areas that are frequented by young audiences, including art galleries, coffee houses, student centers, restaurants, and movie theaters.

 

• Aaron Levy, independent curator

Cities Without Citizens: Statelessness and Settlements in Early America (2003)

Cities Without Citizens juxtaposed historical materials from the Rosenbach collections with contemporary works to examine the cities, settlements and peoples of early America and illuminate how our nation’s past connects with contemporary life. As a commentary on art, archiving, and basic human rights, the exhibition re-indexes Rosenbach holdings according to four social parameters: settlement, citizenship, discipline, and liquidation. The exhibition also explored theories of curatorial innovation, prompting the question of how one might renew or reinvent an archival collection. The curator approached the project with an awareness of the delicate balance between innovative interpretation of history and the conscientious preservation of historical objects. Contributing artists include forensic photographer Lars Wallsten, the disaster relief architectural team of Gans & Jelacic, and installation artist Katrin Sigurdardottir. Cities Without Citizens was curated by artist Aaron Levy, Executive Director of Slought Foundation, an arts organization, gallery, and archival resource engaging contemporary life through critical theories about art.

 

• Michael O’Reilly, film

Planet Greenfield: The Movie (2004).

Video mapping of community history with school students.

 

• Ben Katchor, artist performance

The Rosenbach Company (2004).
music: Mark Mulcahy, text and design: Ben Katchor

Katchor and Mulcahy’s sung-through pop-musical chronicles the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the world’s preeminent rare-book dealer in the first half of the last century and his brother Philip, a savvy dealer of decorative arts. Mixing projected animated images with live actors, singers and musicians, the show explores such issues as the obsessive nature of collecting, the relationship between cultural and commercial pursuits and the men’s historical significance as the owners of some of the world’s greatest literary treasures. This production was originally produced and commissioned by The Rosenbach Museum & Library for its 50th anniversary celebration and as part of the Rosenbach’s artist-in-residence program in September 2004.

 

• Nathalie Anderson, poet

26 Letters, 26 Poets (2004).

In conjunction with the exhibition R is for Rosenbach

Nat Anderson produced 26 Letters, 26 Poets: a reading and publication in celebration of the Rosenbach’s 50th Anniversary.

 

• Linda Goss, Storyteller

Words and Wisdom: African American Literature from Slavery to the Civil Rights Movement. (2005)

 

• Clarissa Sligh, artist installation

100 American, A Presence of the Past in Philadelphia (2007)

In conjunction with the exhibition Look Again: African American History IS American History

An installation of 100 faces of Americans of African descent photographed in Philadelphia.

 

• Dave Burrell, composer

Western Extension of the United States (2009)

Mr. Burrell immersed himself into the Rosenbach’s Americana collection, specifically texts relating to the Oregon Territory, the founding of Astoria, the first permanent U.S. settlement of the Pacific coast, and the diaries of pioneers on the first wagon train and missionaries’ descriptions of native settlements. The museum’s Americana collection proved to be as fertile as many early settlers hoped the west would be and Mr. Burrell’s compositions are the fruit of his year-long labor through these documents. Mr. Burrell then distilled his research into five original compositions for piano and bass, which he performed twice at the museum. Each of the compositions embodied a part of the western spirit in the late 1800’s. Titles include Meandering Waltz, Snake River: a Ballad, and Astoria Rag.

 

• Sue Johnson, artist installation 

Moore Adventures in Wonderland (2009)
With Moore Adventures in Wonderland, artist Sue Johnson created a poetic archive and a hyper visual experience using photography, painting, and digital collage of selected objects from the Rosenbach’s Marianne Moore collection presented in arrangements which recall scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. These multi-media trompe l’oeil images were displayed in large boxes reminiscent of Victorian specimen cabinets.

 

• Maira Kalman, artist

• Bryce Desner, composer

• 1812 Productions, theater

• Archive, artist team

21st-Century Abe, website (2009)

http://www.21stcenturyabe.org

To mark Lincoln’s 200th birthday we explored why we in the 21st century are still obsessed with this 19th-century man. Abe is everywhere, from advertising to political punditry. What does this popular Abe have to do with the historical Abe? 21st-Century Abe took six months to tackle these questions.

We were lucky enough to get a group of very talented artists to give us their take on 21st-Century Abe. The artists visited the Rosenbach Museum & Library to explore the Lincoln documents; from there each artist took off in a different direction, from 19th-century band music to a pilgrimage to Springfield to giant sculptures of Lincoln south of the border. We hope that seeing what these talented folks had done would get visitors to the website to think about “finding” their own Abe.

 

• Enrique Chagoya, printmaker

Enrique Chagoya: The Headache, a print after George Cruikshank (2010)

In conjunction with Philagrafika 2010: Out of Print

Enrique Chagoya is a contemporary print maker based in California. He studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. During his time at the University, he was sent to work on rural development projects, an experience that strengthened his interest in political and social activism and later his work as a print maker. In the fall of 2009 he visited the Rosenbach Museum & Library. The focus of the visit was spent examining at some of the fourteen collectors’ volumes of Cruikshank which were purchased by one of the museum founders Dr. Rosenbach in 1929. These Rosenbach’s collection consists of 4,156 prints, 17 original drawings, issues of comic magazines and illustrated books.

Chagoya then selected Cruikshank’s iconic print The Head Ache as the focus of his project. For Chagoya, the plight of the ailing figure was reminiscent of President Obama’s healthcare “headache.” While this print project created a direct relationship between Cruikshank and Chagoya we invited the public to draw further parallels between these two artists by displaying their work side-by-side for three days in our program space.

 

• Joseph Hallman (Fall 2010- Spring 2011)

On April 9th 2011, Hallman will premiere an original ensemble composition inspired by the Rosenbach’s Mercedes de Acosta collection, which includes letters, photographs, and ephemera relating to cinema and lesbian history.