Providence Public Library

The biennial Updike Prize for Student Type Design is our big typographic event of the season, held this year on Saturday, October 4th at 1:30 PM. This year’s guest speaker is Providence’s own Cyrus Highsmith, and we have so much exciting content around the event and the exhibition of Cyrus’s sketchbooks, mentioned in the previous post. First, as teased previously, the full video of Cyrus in…

We’re getting excited for our next Updike Prize Award Ceremony on Saturday, October 4th, where our guest speaker will be Cyrus Highsmith. Cyrus recently donated to the library his extensive collection (~300 volumes) of the sketchbooks he’s been keeping for the past 30 or so years, which he writes journal entries, sketches, and pastes in ephemera. He is in the process of curating an exhibition of…

Our call for proposals is now open for this year’s Creative Fellowship. More info is available via the library website. The Creative Fellowship is one of the highlights of the year for us, and this year we’re making it a little easier to put together a good proposal. We’ll be holding an open house in Special Collections on Wednesday, September 24th, from 5:00-6:30 PM. Stop in to get a look at…

We’re less than a week away from our 2024-25 Creative Fellow Joe DeGeorge’s presentation, a performance of music he composed inspired by one of our most mysterious whaling logbooks. When third mate Marshall Keith recorded the events of the Brewster’s 1863 voyage he didn’t limit his entries to the standard stuff (location, weather, whales encountered, etc.). He also included a record of his…

Our first Updike Prize news is that it took a while, but our 2023 prize winner Clara Cayosa is finally in possession of the trophy. Clara was out of town for the award ceremony, but we made the handoff at an unofficial award presentation recently. If you’d like to be the next person receiving the trophy, now is the time to be working on your typeface. The deadline for submissions is September…

You’re invited to a panel discussion on November 12th with four of the most exciting letterpress printers in Providence. The Pied Type Panel starts at 5:30 PM in the library’s 3rd floor Seminar Room. We’ll have a chance to hear from, and ask questions of: Andre Lee Bassuet, Jacques Bidon, Lois Harada, and Dan Wood. The panel accompanies the “Pied Type: Letterpress Printing in Providence,…

Local artist and printer Lois Harada has been working on an exhibition on the history of printing in Providence, and you’re invited to the opening reception tomorrow, October 2, from 5-6:30pm. Lois has curated a fascinating batch of materials drawn from our Updike Collection on the History of Printing, as well as materials generously loaned by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, Tomaquag…

This is always one of our favorite announcements: We’re looking for our next Creative Fellow. This year’s medium is “music or sonic expression,” and it’s always exciting to see what kind of projects people come up with. Visit our website for more information about the fellowship, or jump right to the call for papers (pdf link).

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…

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…

Two men and a woman at the bar, 1983https://provlibdigital.org/islandora/object/109-03-0301-01p We are excited to announce that the Kim Deacon Collection photographs are now digitized and available to the public on provlibdigital.org! Kim donated materials in 2021 to the RI LGBTQ+ Community Archives at Providence Public Library.  Her collection documents the Kings & Queen Bar in Woonsocket,…

From a 1917 Gossard Corsets advertising brochure.

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…

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…

Lots of books on tables

From O.I. Leman (Moscow) type specimen book, 1914