“If I had had to map out my career before I started, I wouldn’t have imagined I would have done as many things as I have,” says Page Talbott ’72, who followed her B.A. in art history with advanced degrees in early American culture and American civilization. In the early days, she says, “I often was doing what’s called a historic furniture plan, where I would do research on the house and determine how it might have looked at a particular time or within the context of a particular family.” At Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art and Design, she was the consulting curator for 15 years, and she wrote about the Philadelphia Ten, an important group of women painters and sculptors who worked and exhibited together from 1917 to 1945.
Page joined the celebration of another piece of Philadelphia history, the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, which opened in 2005 and ran through 2008. She was associate director of the project and chief curator of its exhibition, which traveled to five cities in the U.S. and to Paris, was viewed by over 700,000 people, and featured 250 artifacts from 75 collections (many of them private).
To find certain objects, Page had to “reverse-engineer” her search: “There was an organization in Philadelphia called the Friends of Franklin, which consisted of many descendants. I was able to get a hold of a database that they had assembled. Working backward from the present and also forward from the past, based on wills and inventories, we were able to track down where some key items were,” Page says.
Her most recent exhibition, Philadelphia Revealed: Unpacking the Attic, which closed in April, grew out of her work as director of museum outreach at Drexel University’s Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships. A panoply of 650 objects, ranging from historical works of art to ordinary items, such as the Yellow Pages, together told Philadelphia’s 350-year story.
What catches visitors’ interest, Page says, “can either be exceptional or it can be mundane, but in either case, it attracts people’s attention because it speaks to their curiosity.”
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