Creative Fellowship Digital Reading Room

As we reshelve and return Tomboy exhibition items and wrap up the 2021-2022 Creative Fellowship, we want to take a moment to highlight Carmen Ribaudo‘s final (stunning!) fellowship creation: a digital reading room called Shape Becomes Story. The digital reading room features historic and contemporary materials from PPL’s Special Collections and from Queer.Archive.Work that served as part of Carmen’s fellowship research process, along with Carmen’s own creative work.

Created in collaboration with Kate Hao, a graduate student at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, as part of her practicum, the digital reading room is interactive and best viewed on a larger screen (so if you’re on your phone, save this one for when you’re home). If you weren’t able to make it to PPL to see Carmen’s collage movie projected on the wall of the exhibition gallery, this is your big chance to view it alongside the books, zines, comics, and illustrations that inspired it.

Bravo Carmen and Kate on a beautiful and inspiring window into the research and creative process!

Creative Fellow Carmen Ribaudo’s work on display

After many months of Special Collections research, PPL’s 2021-2022 Creative Fellow, Carmen Ribaudo, has created incredible new work as part of our current Tomboy exhibit. We’re so excited to tell you about it and invite you to view it in person at PPL!

First, you can visit PPL’s 3rd floor exhibition gallery to see Carmen’s projected collage movie, We Are Full – the colorful, cut-paper animation explores “the links between being outside, embodiment, tomboys, and queerness.” It’s projected on the wall just inside the door, leading into the full Tomboy exhibit co-curated by Kate Wells and Mary Murphy.

While you’re in the exhibit gallery viewing Carmen’s movie and taking in the Tomboy exhibit, you can also grab a free, colorful, folding comic that Carmen printed on the risograph at Binch Press, an awesome local, volunteer-run print and ceramics cooperative. (It’s also where we printed the Tomboy exhibit catalogs.)

Finally, Carmen’s giving an animated art talk and digital reading room release at the Library on Saturday, May 14, 2022 from 3:00 – 5:00 pm. Learn more and register for the event here!

Updates and a New Creative Fellow

Despite the fact that we’ve been neglecting this blog, we’ve been busy over the past months! Among other things, we’ve been launching the RI LGBTQ+ Community Archive, putting together a virtual exhibition about sleep and dreaming, and digitizing historic newspapers.

We’re also delighted to announce that we’ve selected the recipient of our 2021-2022 Creative Fellowship. Our new Creative Fellow, Carmen Ribaudo, will spend the coming months doing research in PPL’s Special Collections and creating new work related to the theme of our 2022 exhibition, tomboys.

Carmen Ribaudo works with pictures and words. With comics, painting, writing, and animation, she tells stories about characters who are in playful symbiosis with the worlds around them. She thinks about how we become what we do, how we get lost in what we create, and how worlds are built around what we pour ourselves into. She lives in Providence and is from St. Louis. View her work: www.carmenribaudo.com or on Instagram at @carmroses

Whaling in 3D

Our Nicholson Whaling Collection is best known as one of the best sources of whaling logs in the world. But the collection also includes a lot of other amazing, whaling-related material, including manuscripts (over 70 boxes), scrimshaw and photographs, including stereoview photographs like this one:

Stereoview cards like this one were widespread and made in a standard size, and they were designed for use in a viewer. Their essential function was to trick the brain into seeing depth within the image. (More information about stereoviews and the history of 3D images here or here or here.)

Best viewed in person, it’s possible to mimic the effect somewhat by creating an animated composite that shifts quickly back and forth between the two images on the card. The result of the image above, for instance, would be something like this (click the image to view animation):