Opening June 6 – Reception and Special Event
RSVP by May 27 at museum@amphilsoc.org

On June 6, 2013, the APS Museum launches the “Drawing Room,” in conjunction with the museum’s new show Through the Looking Lens. Visitors can go back in time and step into the shoes of Cornelius Varley, the talented artist, scientist, and instrument maker who inspired the exhibition.

Like a typical 19th century “drawing room” or parlor, where families and friends gathered to learn about science, this designated space offers visitors the opportunity to gather knowledge firsthand. Visitors can look through the lenses of drawing instruments, including contemporary versions of a camera obscura and a camera lucida as well as a replica of Varley’s Patent Graphic Telescope (PGT). They can then try their hand at drawing what they see.

The “Drawing Room” will remain open through the end of the exhibition on December 29, 2013.

Instruments Available for Hands-On Exploration:

Camera Obscura – Light from an external source travels through a small hole and strikes a darkened interior surface. The scene outside is projected onto that surface, upside down. This phenomenon was recognized as early as the 5th century BCE and its adaptation as an artist’s tool was continuously improved over the centuries. Using the same principles as the camera obscura, the first photographic camera was created in 1839.
            

Camera Lucida – The camera lucida, patented by William Hyde Wollaston in 1806, reflects an image of an object into the artist’s eye, but that image appears (to the artist) to be projected onto the drawing paper. The camera lucida was more portable than the camera obscura and did not limit the size of paper an artist could use.

Patent Graphic Telescope (PGT) – Varley’s 1811 Patent Graphic Telescope (PGT) combined the optics of a telescope with an eyepiece similar to that of the camera lucida.

Beauvais Lyons
September 10-12 and 16-18, 2010
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Dialogues with Darwin

The Association for Creative Zoology was artist Beauvais Lyons’s response to the continuing controversy over Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. First brought to life in 2007, The Association for Creative Zoology was performed in the APS’s Jefferson Garden in September 2010 as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Lyons posed a parodic challenge to the theory of natural selection by presenting the fictitious “theory of zoomorphic juncture,” which claimed that new species resulted from combining two separate species. Lyons demonstrated this theory at two outdoor kiosks, using lithographic prints and taxidermy sculptures of creatures such as the groundhog-fish and the Pekinese-duck. Lyons dressed as a 1920s-era itinerant American preacher, evoking the era of the Scopes trial, and stayed in character as he discussed his ideas with visitors. Lyons’s work challenged viewers to separate fact from fiction and to reflect on the intersections of science and art, myth and reality.

Beauvais Lyons is Professor of Art and the Director of the Hokes Archives at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he has taught since 1985. His special area of expertise is printmaking. Exhibitions that Lyons has organized for the Hokes Archives have been presented in over 60 galleries and museums in the US, Canada, and Europe. He has published articles in Archaeology Magazine; Leonardo: The Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; and the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2002 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznań, Poland, and in September 2005 he coordinated the IMPACT 4 International Printmaking Conference in Berlin and Poznań.

Brett Keyser, The Voyage of the Beetle, 2009
October 12-14, 19-23, and 28, 2012
Commissioned by the APS Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Dialogues with Darwin

In the short, guerrilla theater piece The Voyage of the Beetle, Brett Keyser set the famous last paragraph from On the Origin of Species to music and sang it to street audiences throughout Philadelphia, troubadour style. He traveled in a Volkswagen Beetle with a giant fiberglass beetle on the roof, recalling Darwin’s seminal voyage on HMS Beagle and his eponymous book, as well as his life-long passion for the study of beetles. For more information about Brett Keyser, please refer to his biography listed under the artist’s project Darwinii (2009).

Written by Glen Berger & Brett Keyser
Performed by Brett Keyser, October 16-18 and 23-25, 2009
Commissioned by the APS Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Dialogues with Darwin

Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man was a swashbuckling, one-man tour de farce that deftly skewered everything you think you know about Darwin. It was a unique and imaginative trip ‘round Darwinism, deep time, evolution, and survival of the fittest that’s serious fun. It was commissioned by the APS Museum from award-winning playwright Glen Berger (two Emmy Awards and nine nominations) and performance artist/director Brett Keyser, and staged in September 2009 as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Keyser performed the one-man play in the intimate setting of the Dialogues with Darwin exhibition gallery amid Darwin’s books and manuscripts. The play’s sole character, Cristobal, tried to convince the audience that he was the great-great-great-bastard-grandson of Darwin, the result of a dalliance while young Darwin was in Tierra del Fuego on the HMS Beagle. Darwinii provided an entertaining, illuminating, and memorable way to understand and absorb accurate information about Darwin’s big idea.

Brett Keyser is a Philadelphia-based performance artist/director whose Nightjar Apothecary produces solo and collaborative works exploring fiction-enhanced episodes in the history of science and technology. Keyser served four years (2006-09) as Artist in Residence at the APS, where he created and performed numerous works. He is an associate artist with the Catskill-based North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL) and a 2010 recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts.

Glen Berger is a New York-based playwright who has received commissions for the Children’s Theater of Minneapolis, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Alley Theatre, and the Lookingglass Theater, among others. He co-wrote the book for the Broadway musical adaptation of Spider Man.

Left: Cornelius Varley, Chara Vulgaris with one globule open (male reproductive part), 1842, APS
Right: Cornelius Varley, Varley’s Patent Graphic Telescope and drawing-table stand, APS

Down the Rabbit Hole with Cornelius Varley
When Lewis Carroll sent Alice down the rabbit hole, he imagined a drink that would make her smaller than a mouse and a cake that would extend her body to the size of “the largest telescope that ever was.”

         
Left: Cornelius Varley, Nitella Translucens,1833, APS. Detail showing translucency and the inner circulation of fluids.
Right: Cornelius Varley, Chara Vulgaris, 1833 & 1844, APS

Through the Looking Lens highlights stunning watercolors by British artist/inventor Cornelius Varley (1781-1873) that range from vast panoramas rendered small to microscopic algae writ large. But unlike the enchantments of Carroll’s imagination, Varley’s wondrous images were of real things. He captured them before the advent of photography, using drawing instruments he invented, along with optical lenses he crafted and employed with great skill.

Cornelius Varley, Snowdon from the Banks of Moel, courtesy Lowell Libson

Varley is known as an artist, but this exhibition is the first ever to showcase him as the inventor and maker of drawing instruments integral to his artistic and scientific practices. Through the Looking Lens reveals the full breadth of Varley’s work at the intersection of art and science. Similar to many early APS members in the 18th and 19th centuries—polymaths such as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Smith Barton, David Rittenhouse, and Alexander Bache—Varley effortlessly traversed the boundaries of multiple disciplines, propelled by his enormous inquisitiveness. Like Carroll’s Alice, Varley was “curiouser and curiouser.”

        
Left: Cornelius Varley, A measured drawing of a skull, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Lowell Libson, Ltd.     Right: Cornelius Varley, “Mr. C. Fary’s Teeth Forceps” from Transactions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, vol. 44, 1825, plate 8, APS

On view is Varley’s Patent Graphic Telescope (PGT)—his most important drawing tool—along with engravings of the vial microscope attachment he invented for his work on algae. Other intriguing works on paper include Varley’s drawings of magnified pieces of mummy cloth, a human skull, cork balls in motion, and original illustrations that were transformed into etchings for mass publication in scientific journals. Varley’s handwritten, autobiographical narrative, also on display, provides context for his extraordinary, multi-faceted life.

Cornelius Varley, Narrative, detail, APS

Varley’s inventions were part of a larger scientific quest to see and record the natural world in ever more exact ways.

Cornelius Varley, Talsarnau, North Wales, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Lowell Libson in honor of Charles Ryskamp

The PGT was superseded during Varley’s lifetime by the invention of the photographic camera in 1839, but his images poignantly demonstrate that what we now call a “photographic” way of seeing had been anticipated and cultivated by artists and scientists long before the advent of photography itself.

Maull & Polyblank, Cornelius Varley (at approximately 80 years old), © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library

For information about the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society, please go to http://www.amphilsoc.org/grants/curatorialfellowship.

The application deadline is January 9, 2012; notification is in early April.

Join us on Wednesday, December 5, 2012 at 6:00p.m. for IT’S ABOUT TIME: Short films from the Secret Cinema Archive inspired by the APS Museum’s current exhibition Tempus Fugit: Time Flies

This will be a feature-length program of rare short films about various aspects of time, all shown in 16mm film.
A few highlights include:
THE TIME MACHINE trailer (1960) – Original theatrical “coming attractions” preview for this sci-fi time travel classic.
DRIVE-IN COUNTDOWN CLOCK (1960s) – Colorfully animated snack foods fill the minutes between the clicking of this giant projected clock, which kept drive-in theater audiences appraised of the time remaining until the main feature’s start.

TIME PIECE (1966) – This fast-moving series of visual gags, abstract animation and unclassifiable slices of the filmmaker’s imagination loosely detail the travails of one man’s daily grind. Starring, and directed by Jim Henson.

TRAVELLING THROUGH TIME (1965) – Pan-Am sponsored this Technicolor educational film that looks at man’s long history of measuring his days (as well as the impact of developments in air travel that effectively shrank the size of our world).

THE EARTH AND IT SEASONS (1937) – Newsreel-style narration and graphics add interest to this early school film about the phases of our planet.

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE (1963) – Expertly filmed depiction of Ambrose Bierce’s short story about a Civil War prisoner’s last moments as he faces execution, and treasures each second of living. This popular film won best short film honors at Cannes and the Oscars, and was the only external production to be shown on television’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

SECRETS OF THE PLANT WORLD (1956) – Gorgeous Technicolor time-lapse photography shows a wide array of flowers and plants as they blossom and maneuver for survival, all skillfully edited to classical music.

Plus more!

The exhibition Tempus Fugit will be open before the screening.

This is a FREE event. Also, street parking is FREE after 5pm.

Snacks and Sodas will be served.

To reserve your seat, please email your name and the total number of people attending to rsvpmuseum@amphilsoc.org. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.

Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012
Doors open at 6:00 pm
Philosophical Hall
104 South Fifth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

Click here for directions.

You can download selected digital preprints here from the upcoming book Of Elephants & Roses: French Natural History, 1790-1830. Please scroll down for the PDFs. Due to copyright restrictions, these preprints are not illustrated. They are for personal, non-commercial, or educational use only and may not be reproduced. The preprints are labeled with the working title of the book.

The book will be available in Spring 2013. A link for order information will be posted on this page at that time. If you would like to be notified via email when the book is available for pre-order, please write to symposiumbook@amphilsoc.org.

The book is an anthology of scholarly essays from a 2011 symposium associated with the APS Museum exhibition Of Elephants & Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790 – 1830. The symposium, titled “Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France,” brought together scholars from the United States and France. Included were presentations on topics related to natural history, from the role of artists and gardeners in botanical science and the representations of a giraffe’s African keepers to the influence of natural history on Balzac’s writing and on the birth of the social sciences. Participants brought interdisciplinary perspectives from material culture, the histories of art and science, visual studies, botany, decorative arts, and cultural history.

Of Elephants & Roses, edited by APS Museum Director and Curator Sue Ann Prince, contains all sixteen talks, the keynote and concluding addresses, the session commentaries, edited transcripts of the audience discussions, and a checklist of the exhibition. The book is illustrated throughout in full color.

Both the symposium and the publication have been made possible by generous funding from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

Read more about the exhibition.

Read more about the symposium.

Image from J. P. Hoüel, Histoire naturelle des deux éléphans (Paris, 1803). Courtesy of The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Ewell Sale Stewart Library

PDF preprints from Of Elephants & Roses: French Natural History, 1790-1830.

Keynote: Civilizing Specimens and Citizens at the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, 1793–1838
—Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.
[PDF]

About Gardens and Gardening

Empress Josephine and the Natural Sciences
—Bernard Chevallier
[PDF]

Josephine as Shepherdess: Estate Management at Malmaison
—Susan Taylor-Leduc
[PDF]

Of Cabbages and Kings: The Politics of Planting Vegetables at the Revolutionary Jardin des Plantes
—Paula Young Lee
[PDF]

Seed Origins: New Varieties of Fruits and Vegetables around Paris at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
—Antoine Jacobsohn
[PDF]

Cultivating Useful Knowledge

André Michaux and French Botanical Diplomacy in the Cultural Construction of Natural History in the Atlantic World
—Elizabeth Hyde
[PDF]

The “Elephant in the Room”: The Impact of the French Seizure of the Dutch Stadholder’s Collection on Relations Between Dutch and French Naturalists
—Elise Lipkowitz
[PDF]

Making Art, Communicating Science

Picturing Nature in a Natural History Museum: The Engravings of the Annales du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, 1802-13
—Pierre-Yves Lacour
[PDF]

Representing Animals with Empathy, 1793–1810
—Madeleine Pinault Sørensen
[PDF]

Botany and the Painting of Flowers: Intersections of the Natural Sciences and the Visual Arts in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century France
—Dorothy Johnson
[PDF]

The Giraffe’s Keepers and the (Dis)play of Difference
—Daniel Harkett
[PDF]

The Visual Terms of Cultural Encounters: Petit and Cuvier’s Australian Experiment
—Anne Lafont
[PDF]

Natural History and French Culture

The Quest for “Lost Worlds”: Intellectual Revolutions and Mutations of the Imagination at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
—Claudine Cohen
[PDF]

Social Species in the Comédie humaine: Balzac’s use of Natural History
—Göran Blix
[PDF]

The Animal Series and the Genesis of Socialism
—John Tresch
[PDF]

Domesticating the Exotic: The Giraffe Craze and French Consumer Culture
—Denise Z. Davidson
[PDF]

An Egyptian Giraffe and Six Osage Indians: An Exotic Plea Against the Censorship of 1827
—Alain Lescart
[PDF]

Do you wonder where all your time has gone? Does time really fly when you’re having fun? Share and listen to personal stories about the passage of time as the APS Museum and First Person Arts join forces for the first time to host a StorySlam at the APS.

Find out more about StorySlams here.

Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 7 p.m.
APS Museum
104 S. 5th St.

This is a FREE event

Seating is limited — register by emailing rsvpmuseum@amphilsoc.org

This event is in partnership with