M*AR: Black Founders

FEBRUARY 2023

The Museum of the American Revolution had another stellar temporary exhibit, this time on James Forten and his descendants. This exhibit was called Black Founders: The Forten Family of Philadelphia. At first blush, it did not sound very interesting – I had never heard of this guy and wondered why MoAR’s exhibit was focused on this one man. But, in true MoAR fashion, the exhibit went above and beyond any expectations to give a thorough telling of not only the Forten family’s history, but also contextualized their times and paid homage to their descendants.

Side note: The ENTIRE exhibit is available virtually!!

Who Was James Forten?

James Forten was born free in Philadelphia in 1766. His father was a sail maker in the city but died when James was young. By the time he was 14, Forten was a privateer under Captain Stephen Decatur during the American Revolution, but their ship the Royal Louis was captured. He was offered the opportunity to study in England but declined for patriotic reasons.

Instead he was sent to the prison ship New Jersey and held captive for seven months. Upon his release, he joined a merchant ship that went to London for over a year. When he returned to Philadelphia in 1790, he apprenticed to Robert Bridges, his father’s former employer, to learn the sail making trade. Eight years later, in 1798, Bridges retired and Forten bought the business, becoming one of the wealthiest businessmen, black or white, in Philadelphia.

Dedication Day 2022 aka the Gettysburg Address

NOVEMBER 2022

I had wanted to visit Gettysburg at peak leaf peeping season but October was full of more deadlines than lead time. The earliest I could get to town was the weekend of November 19. Which actually really worked out – it was the 159th Dedication Day event, which I hadn’t realized until I couldn’t find a hotel room for under $200.

In all my visits to Gettysburg, I had not yet experienced anything surrounding the dedication of the cemetery. So it was nigh time to cross that off the list.

On a parallel note, if you read my post on The Frozen Hours, a novel of the Korean War, this was also the trip that set all of that into motion …

HISTORY

(Paraphrased from the Soldiers National Cemetery NPS.gov website)

Three days of fighting at Gettysburg took a horrible toll on both armies: roughly 10,000 soldiers killed or mortally wounded, 30,000 injured, and 10,000 captured or missing. The dead were hastily buried in shallow graves on the battlefield, crudely identified by pencil writing on wooden boards. As weeks passed rain and wind eroded the impromptu graves. In response, Gettysburg’s citizens called for the creation of a soldiers’ cemetery for the proper burial of the Federal dead. The reburial process began on October 27, 1863.

…

A few weeks after the burial process started, a dedication ceremony was held at the unfinished Soldiers’ National Cemetery. The cemetery committee chose Massachusetts statesman and orator Edward Everett to deliver the main speech. The committee asked President Abraham Lincoln to deliver “a few appropriate remarks.” After Everett’s lengthy remarks, Lincoln rose and spoke for two minutes; his brief speech today is known as the “Gettysburg Address.” His speech honored the men who fought at Gettysburg and invoked their sacrifice as a cause to continue fighting for the preservation of the United States.

2020: The Year of the Dumpsterfire

*peers from behind fingers*

Is it over yet? Have we finally moved on to 2021?

2020 at a glance

It will be interesting to see how history looks back on this single incident that left its impact over the entire world. Like how there’s a (fading) collective memory for World War II, or how everyone remembers when the Twin Towers were hit. Or even scientifically, everything pre-atom bomb and everything post-atom bomb, as measured by levels of cesium in stuff.

Anyway.

What follows is something like a year in review, but divided into categories for your easy reading:

Lockdown Link Dump

Well, Dear Reader(s), things are certainly interesting now. I hope you’re all keeping journals of this time. One day, they’ll become first-account sources used by scholars that haven’t been born yet. Have you always wanted to make history? Now is your chance!

What have I been doing during quarantine? For me, it’s been an opportunity to catch up on different projects, maybe work through that stack of library books that aren’t collecting late fees right now (yay!), and trying to avail myself of all the culture that is suddenly online and accessible to all. Artists, JSTOR, even the Metropolitan Opera are putting their content online, free of charge. (Last week, I did sixteen hours of Wagner’s The Ring Cycle from the Met in four days …  oofdah.) Historic entities like Mount Vernon and The Battlefield Trust are putting their tours and workshops online. If you can, I highly encourage making a schedule of enrichment and not feeling guilty for any of it. Times like these are unprecedented – yes, for all the scary, unknown, how-am-I-going-to-pay-rent ways, but also for the amount of cultural content suddenly available to folks who normally can’t pay for anything. Like me.

This post is my Lockdown Link Dump, with cultural links and random history things I thought was interesting. Grab a drink and peruse to your heart’s content.

 

 

The Life and Times of an Irish Soldier

For six months this year, the Museum of the American Revolution has a temporary exhibit on an Irish soldier who fought for the British in the American Revolution and who also fought for the British during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. This is M*AR’s first exhibit with international loans, and I was able to catch it after-hours on opening weekend. Conclusion: I hope they have more exhibits like this.

 

Richard St. George at different stages in his life.

 

From the brochure and description of the exhibit:

What can a life tell us about an era?

Follow the untold story of Irish soldier and artist Richard St. George, whose personal trauma and untimely death provide a window into the entangled histories of the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish Revolution of 1798. The art he created and commissioned visualizes a unique perspective of the physical and emotional costs of these revolutionary moments.

In 1776, Richard St. George joined the British Army and donned a red coat to fight against the American “rebels.” Over the next twenty years, St. George survived a severe head wound at the Battle of Germantown, mourned over the tragic death of his wife, and saw the rule of kings and of gentlemen like himself violently challenged on two continents. Along the way, he made sketches, published cartoons, and commissioned portraits and paintings to document his experiences and emotions. In 1798, he stood in opposition to the growing Irish Revolution and was killed by his tenants.

As a result of new discoveries made by the Museum’s curators, the art and artifacts from St. George’s life and death will be reunited in Philadelphia from across the globe.

Drawn from Nature

or John James Audubon at Mill Grove, Pennsylvania

There’s a new museum of sorts in town so, naturally, I had to go check it out. Located in Audubon, Pennsylvania, the museum is dedicated to, well, Audubon – the man, the naturalist, the legend.

About ten minutes north-ish of Valley Forge sits Mill Grove, a property deeded in 1761 from a tract of land previously owned by Billy Penn himself. It also happens to be the estate where the young John James Audubon was sent by his father to evade conscription into Napoleon’s army. This site’s claim to fame is that it is 1) Audubon’s first home in America and 2) the only Audubon-related site still in existence.

Designing the Museum of the Future

It seems the Museum of the American Revolution has turned into a favorite and “frequent” haunt of mine for I was there again this past week for a lecture called “Designing the Museum of the Future.” The speaker, Josh Goldblum, is the CEO of Blue Cadet, the A/V company who did all the digital interactive work for M*AR. If you recall that my very first visit to the place was full of sensory overload and that the beautiful layer masks of the intro video got a special call out – this was the guy leading that production team.

(One of my favorite effects, used throughout, was taking an old ink drawing or etching of a scene and then layering a gradient plus film footage to give that drawing or etching depth and motion. Water scenes were overlaid over actual moving water textures, smoke was overlaid over smoke video footage, and subtle colors brought the scenes to life.)

(This is the link to the M*AR page on Blue Cadet’s website. It’s got some great shots of the museum.)

The lecture was organized by AIGA, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, which is sort of the club to belong to if you want to network yourself most effectively as a designer. There was sort of an interesting dichotomy of attendees – designers in bright, mismatched patters with hair colors not found in nature, next to the more subdued, old school button-down shirts and neutral colored blazers. But what I loved was that a topic like this could bring such disparate groups together.

Mr. Goldblum raised many points that I have at some point or another considered. I am so glad he’s a self-confessed “museum person” – he gets it. Better – he’s in a position to look at different ways of addressing the challenges faced by museums and similar institutions. And because his background is design and technology, these fields are still relatively novel in the museum world so there’s a lot of room to experiment.

One thing this talk did not do was address specific things that museums should do or ought to do, or things that they do that aren’t working. For example, Mr. Goldblum does not offer solutions for successful capital campaigns. This talk was very much more on the effect that technology has had so far on life and how museums are coping.

And so, without further ado, my notes from the talk (with my comments in parentheses):

Hello.

The Terracotta Warriors

A prominent museum in Philadelphia, The Franklin Institute, “is one of the oldest and premier centers of science education and development in the country”. That makes sense – Franklin himself was a more than just a thinker. He was a curious tinkerer and creative problem solver. So I was intrigued when I heard that several of the Terracotta Warriors from China would be on exhibit there because, to me, they seem more like a subject of history. Perhaps I’m biased, being a history nerd and all that.

This was a traveling exhibit, spending the first six months of its life at the Pacific Science Center (PSC) in Seattle, Washington, before spending the last six months of its life at the Franklin. Knowing that, it was interesting to see how the pieces of the exhibit fit into the space. I would have liked to go visit it at the PSC just to see the layout choices between two very different floor plans.

Anyway, back to the Terracotta Warriors themselves …

 

The standing figure is an acrobat while the kneeling figure is an archer.

moar MoAR!: The Slavery Issue

Is there anything more fitting than visiting the Museum of the American Revolution (again) on Memorial Day? I certainly can’t think of anything, for without the people and events exhibited within, we wouldn’t even have a Memorial Day.

Tomb of the Unknown (RevWar) Soldier, Washington Square, Philadelphia. The Tomb’s inscription reads, “Beneath this stone rests a soldier of Washington’s army who died to give you liberty.”
 

This was my second trip to the MoAR, and I was determined to focus on content and not exhibit design. I would like to report that I was much more successful this time than last at staying on task, although I did still have an urgent and visceral need to touch every surface I passed.

[EDIT: So concerned am I that I sound ill-informed on this topic that I went to the library and got several books about slavery and the Revolutionary era. Stay tuned…]

Curious Revolutionaries

In my previous post on the MoAR, I had included a picture of some life sized figures, one of whom was solicitously wrapping another in a blanket or jacket. It was a depiction of Charles Willson Peale belatedly recognizing his own brother, and the picture’s caption was something about how much I adore Mr. Peale (hereafter known as CWP).

From the MoAR

Why do I like CWP so much? That is an excellent question. Perhaps it was because I was thrilled when I could consistently put a name to the artist behind all those portraits, which are done in a style I find generally attractive.