What:
The Girl of My Dreams, Sylvia: A 19th Century Life temporary exhibit opens at John Brown House Museum
Where:
John Brown House Museum (52 Power St., Providence, RI 02906)
The Girl of My Dreams: Sylvia, A 19th Century Life is at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum in Providence, RI.
The Girl of My Dreams, Sylvia: A 19th Century Life exhibit opens at John Brown House Museum
History Inspires Art in New Temporary Display
(PROVIDENCE, R.I.) – The Rhode Island Historical Society invites the public to view its latest temporary exhibit, The Girl of My Dreams, Sylvia: A 19th Century Life from artist Stacy Morrison now on display in the RIHS’s museum at the John Brown House.
The exhibit features the contents from a small 19th-century trunk discarded on a New York City Street Morrison encountered twenty years ago that once belonged to Sylvia DeWolf Ostrander (1841-1925), a member of the prominent DeWolf family. Inspired by these physical remnants that hinted at Sylvia’s life story, Morrison created photographs that blur past and present and a clothing line that pulls visual inspiration from the handwritten text and graphics found in Sylvia’s trunk.
“I study the personal effects of women from the past with the attentiveness of a detective, the caution of a conservator, the engagement of a fiction writer, and the curiosity of an artist,” Morrison explains. The result is a microhistory that brings to life a Victorian woman’s forgotten story.
As the RIHS’s staff work towards the full reinterpretation of the museum–transitioning from a traditional house museum into galleries featuring recent scholarly research that places Rhode Island in its global contexts up to 1860–Stacy’s show is a creative departure from this evolution.
The intent, according to Richard Ring, Deputy Executive Director for Collections and Interpretation, is to “feature how an artist can interact with, be moved by, and create art in conversation with history and the surviving objects which represent it.”
The Girl of My Dreams, now open at the John Brown House located at 52 Power Street in Providence, will be open through August 2025. General admission costs $10 per person and is free for RIHS members, other discounts are available.
The Museum is open Friday from 1-4pm and Saturdays 10am-4pm.
Stacy Renee Morrison is a visual artist who often forgets what century she is in. In her blurriness between the 19th century and 21st century she finds herself haunted by women who lived their lives well before her own and creates visual biographies of them. When she is fully present in the 21st century.
Stacy teaches in the MFA Visual Narrative, BFA Photography and Video, and Humanities and Sciences Departments at School of Visual Arts in New York City. She never misses an opportunity to dress up as a 19th century woman. To learn more about Stacy Renee Morrison, please visit her website at: stacyreneemorrison.com.