Art
How To Find 14 Missing Pages of a Rare Book
Artist Research Fellow Alexander D’Agostino uses ChatCPT to help imagine what the fourteen missing pages of a magical Folger manuscript could be like.
Visualizing Race Virtually: Exploring the art of Shakespeare
David Sterling Brown writes about the images and ideas presented in his virtual-reality exhibition, which features art from the Folger collection.
David and Eva Garricks’ Villa at Hampton: Shakespeare in the Landscape
Folger Fellow Kasie Alt explores Eva Maria Garrick’s role in the landscaping of their Hampton estate.
The Fairy King’s Grimoire
A guest post by Alexander D’Agostino I am an artist working with queer histories and images, through performance and visual art. During my Artist Research Fellowship with the Folger, I am creating The Fairy King’s Grimoire: a reimagining of the…
Macbeth and the End of Slavery in the United States
What can Shakespeare say about the original sin of the United States, slavery? As two artists in the Civil War era thought, a lot. Two cartoons in the Folger’s collections, drawn around a decade apart, allude to Shakespeare’s Macbeth to…
Frederick William MacMonnies, Shakespeare, circa 1895
Thanks for the great guesses about the object shown in the September Crocodile Mystery! Dawn Kiilani Hoffmann got it right. The photo shows the bottom of the bronze Shakespeare sculpture at the foot of the stairs from the Reading Room.…
When the Body is Ill, The Mind Suffers: Shakespeare's Unravelling of Women’s Hysteria and Madness in the Elizabethan Era
a guest post by Alexandria Zlatar During my research fellowship with the Folger Institute, my investigation has undertaken an exploration into a highly under-represented aspect of mental health and has focused on lived-in experiences of mental illness in Shakespearian England.…
Different versions of a print, or different states?
When I began working on the March 1 Collation post about watchpapers, I saw right away I’d need to make a correction to the catalog record for Mr. Quin in the character of Sr. John Falstaff. Hamnet gave the publisher’s address…
Visualizing Shakespeare’s Birds
a guest post by Missy Dunaway Greetings! I was the Folger Shakespeare Library’s artist-in-residence in November of 2021. I dedicated my Folger Institute Fellowship to a painting project entitled Birds of the Bard. This growing collection of paintings will catalog…
18th-century watchpapers
Thanks for the great guesses about the March 2022 Crocodile Mystery! All were different, all were plausible, and all were incorrect. It would have been easier if I’d included other examples of the same type of print, because they’re always…
Extra-Illustrating Othello
a guest post by Patricia Akhimie On my last visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Fall 2019 (a time that seems all too distant now) to conduct research for a new edition of Othello, I set myself the goal…
Paper Trades
Thank you for your insightful comments on our Crocodile Mystery, which I enjoyed reading as usual. My heartfelt thanks also to Andrew Hare, Supervisory East Asian Painting Conservator, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National…