We’re pleased to announce that our 2021-2022 Creative Fellow, Carmen Ribaudo, is presenting an Animated Art Talk and Digital Reading Room Release at Providence Public Library on Saturday, May 14, 2022 at 3 pm.
You can read details about the event in the calendar listing here. Capacity is limited, so register today!
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
PPL is now accepting proposals for our 2021 Creative Fellowship! We’re looking for an artist working in illustration or two-dimensional artwork to create new work related to the theme of our 2021 exhibition, Tomboys.
View the full call for proposals, including application instructions, here. The application deadline is October 1, 2020 April 1, 2021*.
*This deadline has shifted since we originally posted this call for proposals! The 2021 Fellowship, and the Exhibition & Program Series, have both been shifted forward by six months due to the coronavirus. Updated deadlines and timeline in the call for proposals!
I’ve been trudging my way through Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a book about which I can’t articulate anything positive or negative that hasn’t already been said more thoroughly and eloquently than one could manage in an introductory paragraph to a blog post. However, in light of discussions around the book, I’ve been thinking about girls and women who defy society’s rigid expectations, those truly wonderful spinsters of fiction and their tomboyish counterparts— including, of course, “Romping Polly”, the free-spirited star of this week’s Bad Children of History.
Romping Polly is another of the ill-fated children from the classic Struwwelpeter, a book last featured in our first-ever Bad Children of History post. The illustrations of Polly below are again taken from the 1890 English translation of the book, published in Philadelphia by Porter & Coates.
At the very beginning of “The Story of Romping Polly”, we see her receiving a stern warning about her inappropriately-feminine styles of play:
I know that you will often see
Rude boys push, drive, and hurry;
But little girls should never be
All in a heat and flurry.
Nodding her tomboy-ish head, Polly acknowledges her aunt’s lecture, and then promptly scurries down some sort of decorative border and leaps toward her jumping and running playmates. Looks like fun, right?
WRONG! There’s nothing fun about falling down such that your leg detaches like a lizard’s tail. (Mind you, the text simply says that “her poor leg was broken”, but the illustration leads me to believe that it was something infinitely more drastic.)
Polly is carried away on a makeshift stretcher, while her detached leg (or should I say “the limb all wet and gory”) is carried away by her tearful brother.
Let’s choose to ignore the butcher’s knives in the lower left of that illustration, shall we?
What happened to poor, rough-playing, enthusiastically-frolicking Polly? How did her life turn out, in the wake of her inattention to compulsory 19th century feminine behavior?
Full many a week, screwed up in bed,
She lingered sad and weary;
And went on crutches, it is said,
Ev’n to the grave so dreary.
Yep. Little ladies, don’t try to play with the boys, or else you may end up a hunched woman in an unflattering bonnet walking with crutches toward your own gravesite. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
Notes For Bibliophiles 