Featured Events
Join us to celebrate Marian Anderson’s 126th birthday with a display of materials from her archive—photographs, programs, correspondence, contracts, publicity posters, music manuscripts, sheet music, and more—and birthday treats, of course!
Penn students, faculty, and staff are welcome to drop in to visit this pop-up exhibit. Registration is requested for guests outside of the Penn community.
Douglass Day is a celebration of 19th-century Black achievement held annually on February 14th, the day Frederick Douglass chose to celebrate his birthday. Each year communities gather at universities and colleges across the country to transcribe documents and help create new & freely available resources for learning about Black history. This year, the focus will be on transcribing the papers of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, African American activist, teacher, writer, and lawyer. Please join us in helping to make these documents accessible online while gathering with community, enjoying music and birthday cake. Co-organized with the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.
Join us at Penn Libraries, in the Class of 78 Pavilion in the Kislak Center, to help make these documents accessible online while enjoying music. A display of antislavery primary sources related to Douglass will be on display in the Lea Library.
Please bring your own laptop, if possible, for transcribing. If you do not have a computer, a limited number of shared devices will be provided.
More information about Douglass Day.
Co-sponsored by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.
Filmmaker, writer, actor, and musician Terence Nance’s first solo exhibition will shed light on his interdisciplinary film and media work including Random Acts of Flyness—the Peabody Award-winning HBO series that examines contemporary Black life in America—and semi-animated feature film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. This exhibition is curated by Maori Karmael Holmes, artistic director and CEO of BlackStar Projects.
This exhibition marks the first US solo museum presentation of the work of New York/Philadelphia–based artist and writer Carolyn Lazard (US, b. 1987). Working across disciplines and mediums, Lazard explores the social and political dimensions of care at the intersection of race, gender, and disability. Focusing on accessibility and dependency, their artworks and published writings center illness as a site of abundance and collectivity.
Celebrate Women Artists and Creatives
This full-day festival celebrates women and femme artists from around the world, featuring art and performances from some of the region’s best female artists and creatives. Honor the power and diversity of feminine creativity with a day of activities the whole family can enjoy, like live performances, hands-on workshops, storytelling, and an artist marketplace. Included with Museum Admission
In 2019 the Ashley Bryan Center donated the archive of the renowned artist, author, and humanitarian Ashley Bryan, who died last year at the age of 98, to the Kislak Center at the Penn Libraries. This exhibition explores his century-long story, the story of one man—seeking his place in a world that did not always welcome him, finding himself through observation and expression, and using his creative gifts to make sense of his life and to help others to do the same.
A symposium celebrating the opening of the exhibition Beautiful Blackbird: The Creative Spirit of Ashley Bryan will bring together a range of speakers to reflect on Ashley Bryan's legacy as an artist, teaher, children's book author and illustrator, and citizen of the world.