Date / Time
- March 10, 2022
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Please join us for an intimate fundraiser to support this year’s Bloomsday Festival, back out on Delancey Place for the first time since 2019! All proceeds directly support The Rosenbach and its free programming, such as this keystone event that draws Ulysses lovers from across the globe.
Guests are invited to Philadelphia’s historic Acorn Club for a special seated presentation by The Rosenbach’s Director of Collections Judith M. Guston and Associate Curator, Alexander L. Ames to learn about the curation and making-of our Bloomsday exhibition, 18 Reasons to Read Ulysses: A Centennial Celebration followed by a cocktail reception.
PLEASE NOTE that The Acorn Club requests that all guests show proof of vaccination upon entry.
About the exhibition
Opens to the public in June 2022
This year marks a century since the publication of James Joyce’s Modernist masterpiece, Ulysses. The Rosenbach, home to the only complete manuscript of the novel and the location of Philadelphia’s annual Bloomsday celebration, marks this occasion with a thematic walk around the novel’s eighteen episodes.
The exhibition challenges the novel’s reputation as a difficult book to read, presenting eighteen highlights from the manuscript, each representing a single theme—along with related objects from The Rosenbach’s collections. Visitors can engage with these thematic groupings separately or connect them to the larger nexus of ideas at play in the novel. Nationhood, food, literature, music, identity, and love are just a few of the themes we ask you to ponder.
The exhibition will be enhanced by over one hundred paintings by contemporary artist, Heather Ryan Kelley, whose work on Ulysses is a visually engaging meditation on the themes of the novel.
Date / Time
- March 10, 2022
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm