Come join us at 5pm on Tuesday, May 7th to get an in-progress update on the work of our Digital Humanities Fellow, Abby Dolan. Abby has been working with the images and metadata the records of an 1887 whaling voyage undertaken by Black whaling master William Martin. Abby will be giving a demo about how the project is going so far, and attendees will have a chance to test out the site and ask questions.
We’re now in the season of all things whaling here at PPL. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop in to see “From Hold to Horizon,” which is not just an exhibition but also an opportunity for interaction with the curators, Becci Davis and Kei Soares Cobb. Kei and Becci have created a beautiful space in our exhibition gallery, and you can register for one or more of the activation days, on which they will lead “rituals of transformation” in the space.
While you’re heading to the gallery, don’t miss Allison Bianco’s Stand to Sea exhibition outside the gallery space. It features multiple beautiful prints, drawing on Special Collections materials, including the logbooks of William Martin, which are also featured in Becci and Kei’s exhibition.
It’s now been a full decade since the Whale Guitar launched at PPL with a concert and exhibition. It was such a great time that Jen Long is bringing it back to port for a 10-year anniversary event on April 24th. There will be musical performances (shanties!) and more, and the guitar itself will be on display in our Rhode Island Room gallery.
That’s just what we have going on so far this month. In May and June we’ll have the opportunity to hear from our Digital Humanities Fellow and our Creative Fellow, who are both currently at work on exciting projects. Stay tuned…
Kim donated materials in 2021 to the RI LGBTQ+ Community Archives at Providence Public Library. Her collection documents the Kings & Queen Bar in Woonsocket, R.I. as well as the LGBT community in Rhode Island from the 1970s-early 2000s. Kings & Queens was a gay bar at 285 Front Street in Woonsocket in operation from 1977-2002. It was opened by Rita Paux (1922-2015) and operated by Kim Deacon (1951- ) from that time until it closed in 2002. Kim Deacon is a lifelong resident of Woonsocket, R.I. She is a community activist, martial arts instructor and was the long-time manager of the Kings & Queens, Kim and Rita Paux were close friends and chosen family members after meeting. Rita called Kim her daughter and Kim referred to Rita as her “step-father”. Together, the two women created a safe haven for members of the LGBTQ+ community to express themselves. Kings & Queens included a bar and small dance floor. During her time operating the bar, Kim increasingly added annual events and holiday parties, fundraisers, and drag shows as well as regularly scheduled evenings for live entertainment, karaoke, darts, card games, and movie nights. In addition, she created social opportunities for LGBTQ+ people including bowling, softball and flag football leagues, bi-annual picnics at Lincoln Woods and seasonal roller skating nights at a local rink.
The bulk of Kim’s full collection includes photographs and videos, but additional clippings, event calendars and ephemera are also included. While over 650 photographs are now digitized, the other materials are available to be viewed at PPL. The images represent the bar as a gay social space and include events such as holiday parties, drag shows and fundraisers as well as events for the LGBT community sponsored by the bar including bi-annual picnics, roller skating nights and leagues for softball, bowling, flag football and darts. We are so excited to have her photographs described and available online for people to reminisce about their own time at K&Q with friends or to learn about LGBTQ local history.
PPL’s fantastic Makerspace staff and users have put together a really fun exhibition in the 3rd floor Joan T. Boghossian Gallery. Not only can you come in and see some amazing locally-made artwork, you can get inspiration for your own projects that you can bring to life in our workshop. (You can even make a short stop-motion film while you’re in the gallery itself.)
Katie in front of the poster in the Trinity Rep. Theater window
We had an absolutely fantastic keynote lecture by Katie Garth last week as part of our 2023 Updike Prize ceremony. If you ever get a chance to hear Katie discuss her art and her process don’t miss it. We celebrated our three excellent finalists–Emily Bluedorn, Clara Cayosa, and Tina Zhou and announced that Clara Cayosa is this year’s Updike Prize winner.
Here’s a photo of the trophy, a fully-functional composing stick:
We’ve noticed an increasing number of researchers interested in a very specific collection over the past year – specifically, a set of recordings of TV220, a cable-access television show that aired from the late 1990s-mid 2000s produced by AS220. Maybe it’s curiosity and nostalgia for the analog VHS format, an appreciation for the grainy aesthetics inherent to the production or a sense of appreciation for the artistic and political freedom of cable-access in a time before social media? Regardless of the reason, folks are coming in just to watch some TV.
The AS220 Archives are housed here in PPL’s Special Collection and include a veritable treasure trove of materials about Providence’s art scene in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We digitized the recordings from the original VHS tapes and had a group of volunteers participate in creating metadata over the course of about three years. Each individual spent time watching episodes and then creating descriptions and assigning subject headings to aid research access.
Jane Freiman holds the record of describing the most TV220 episodes – a whopping 80% of the total 177 videos were described by her. She describes watching over 45 hours of TV220 as an experience of “sheer sensorial excess”. Jane recently wrote an amazing piece titled “TV220: cable-access television as a hub for creativity and low-brow antics” in the Brooklyn Rail (September 2023) about TV220 and the wild experience of trying to assign structured metadata to an inherently unstructured program. She observes, “The stodginess and stoicism of archival description clashed in humorous ways with the nonsensical tenor of TV220. How does one, for example, formally describe “The Farting Evangelist,” an unmissable segment from 2001 featuring unattributed found footage of fart sound effects played over a televangelist’s preaching? ” It’s a great question! Jane chose not to assign it a Library of Congress subject heading, but to include a narrative description that is keyword searchable.
Our hope is to make TV220 episodes available on our digital repository in the future, but in the meantime, you are welcome to come visit us in our reading room to watch the videos on a laptop with headphones (we’ll ask that you only subject yourself to the farting evangelist and not the whole reading room).
Special Collections at PPL 