Commercial America

Slought is pleased to announce Commercial America, a project that takes as its starting point the closure of the Commercial Museum. The Commercial Museum was built in 1899 in part to preserve materials from world's fairs, but since its closure in 1991 these rich holdings of cultural artifacts and ephemera have been dispersed to museums and other non-profit organizations in the Greater Philadelphia area. In presenting a selection of the remaining artifacts from April 30 through June 12, 2010, we seek to raise questions concerning storage and preservation, and in particular the presumption that collecting institutions store artifacts in perpetuity. The project also calls attention to the dispersion of these holdings to other institutions, in order to raise questions about how collections come into being and the manner in which cultural value is determined. It has been organized in conjunction with a 2010 curatorial seminar in the Department English at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Commercial Museum was founded by William Wilson, a botany professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Inspired by the monumental Columbian World's Fair in Chicago of 1893, it opened in 1899 and became the official repository for artifacts from world's fairs of that era. It displayed objects from around the world, and in so doing functioned both as a tourist destination as well as an educational resource about foreign commerce and industry. The Museum also distributed a monthly publication, Commercial America, from which this exhibition takes its name. It is particularly ironic that the Museum's history reflects late 19th century optimism and an embrace of commerce given the museum's subsequent dissolution and its inability to adapt to changing values and trade ideologies over the course of the 20th century.

Upon the museum's closing, the City of Philadelphia, according to the legal requirements set forth by the Orphan's Court, distributed the collection among universities and cultural organizations. Through this process institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology selected artifacts for their collection; later, a wide variety of smaller organizations including Temple University's Anthropology Lab, the Philadelphia Free Library, and the Mutter Museum, among others, chose remaining items. The artifacts on display in the Slought galleries were chosen from those still remaining in storage nineteen years after the Museum's closure and include a broad selection of items from unidentified time periods including feathered headresses, Polynesian oars and spears, baskets, dioramas, figurines, and jars of dry food. Shortly thereafter, on February 17, 2010, all unclaimed items were discarded by the city. To reinforce the displacements of these objects from the collection of which they were once a part, and the accompanying loss of history and provenance this entails, the objects on display at Slought Foundation are shown without captions, in acknowledgement of their anonymous status.