5 December 2009 through December 2010

In Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction and Poverty in Urban America, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg document the daily lives of homeless drug users, drawing upon more than a decade of fieldwork they conducted among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers who survive on the streets of San Francisco’s former industrial neighborhoods. About 40 black and white photographs are interwoven with edited transcriptions of tape recorded conversations, fieldwork notes, and critical analysis to explore the intimate experience of homelessness and addiction. Revealing the social survival mechanisms and perspectives of this marginalized “community of addicted bodies,” the exhibition also sheds light on the often unintended consequences of public policies that can exacerbate the suffering faced by street-based drug users in America. Righteous Dopefiend is presented in conjunction with the Slought Foundation which offered a multimedia installation with related programming that ran December 3 through 31, 2009.

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29 January through 11 April 2010
Third Floor Video Theatre

What in the World is an interactive installation created by multi-disciplinary artist Pablo Helguera as part of the Philagrafika contemporary art festival. The interactive exhibition is based on the popular 1950s TV show What in the World? created by former Penn Museum director, Dr. Froelich Rainey. Mr. Helguera offers a new perspective on the Museum's collection, "not through the traditional reading of an artifact as representative of the ideas and customs of an ancient culture, but instead as representative of the ideas and customs of those who collected it in the first place, bringing to the fore the singularities of historical curatorial visions."

As one of five "Out of Print" cultural partners participating in the Philagrafika 2010 international contemporary art festival, the Penn Museum hosted New York-based artist Pablo Helguera. After exploring the Museum and its collections, he developed a project that taps into the vast archival resources of the institution. The provocative new installation features a recreated set from the famous television program, Museum artifacts, and a series of videos designed to provide "an unauthorized biography" of the 123-year-old Penn Museum.

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10 December 2009

"If you can imagine and see a community in a different way, you can create a community in a different way."
- Reverend Patrick Cabello Hansel, Founder of the Goodlands®

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Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past and Present of the Lenape in Pennsylvania will be open in our Hover gallery 13 September 2008 through 11 July 2010.

Conventional histories of Pennsylvania declare that all but a few elderly Lenape people left the state by the opening of the 19th century. Yet, many remained in secret. Children of the little known Lenape-European marriages of the 1700s stayed on the Lenape homelands, practicing their traditions covertly. Hiding their heritage, they avoided discovery by both the government and their neighbors for more than two hundred years. Now, the descendants of these people have come forward to tell their story.

Fulfilling a Prophecy, organized by the Penn Museum together with the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, features never before displayed objects from the private collections of Lenape people in Pennsylvania, in addition to historic and contemporary photographs and archaeological objects from the collections of Penn Museum. Ancient masks, dolls, jewelry, and other traditional arts are featured, as well as a number of once-secret family heirlooms, rich with hidden Lenape symbolism, dating from the early 19th century.

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