Summer Whitmania!
Walt Whitman, age 35, from the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison.
It’s Walt Whitman’s bicentennial year, and that has meant lots of press for ‘America’s poet.’ A feature story in our current issue explores the three major New York-based exhibitions on view the summer at the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and the Morgan Library. (You can catch all three in mid-July if you time it right.)
However, there are many Whitman-related exhibits and events beyond Manhattan’s “spires and masts,” notably Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy, a yearlong project organized by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, with partner organizations across the region. (Whitman lived his final years in Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia.) Whitman at 200 includes the exhibition, Whitman Vignettes: Camden and Philadelphia, on view at Penn’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library through August 23, as well as four artistic projects taking place now and through the summer with major support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
There are also Whitman exhibitions ongoing at the University of Delaware, Rutgers, and the Camden County Historical Society, to name just a few, as well as special readings, historic house tours, and musical events all along the Eastern Seaboard. Check the full event schedule here.
