Open September 28, 2024- January 5, 2025
The largest known exhibition of early presidential campaign flags and textiles ever shown by any museum, Faces of a Nation: The American Political Textile Collection of Mark and Rosalind Shenkman opens September 28, 2024 - January 5, 2025 at the Peoria Riverfront Museum.
Featuring more than 120 of the rarest flags, banners, and kerchiefs and additional selections, the Shenkman Collection also showcases historic ballot boxes, campaign torches, and sheet music produced between 1840 and 1912 to promote presidential candidates.
The exhibition includes the rarest and most valuable Abraham Lincoln campaign flag in existence, appropriately displayed a block away from where Lincoln's 1854 "Peoria Speech" marked his political turning point and launched him into national abolitionist prominence.
These early American folk art textiles are revered not only for their incredible historical context, but also for their beauty as decorative textiles. Prior to 1912, the specific design of the American national flag was left up to the interpretation and imagination of the maker and it was acceptable for candidates to place their names, faces, and slogans on the symbol of our nation.
Organized exclusively with the Peoria Riverfront Museum, the exhibition is the most important private American political history collection to be displayed in historic Peoria, Illinois and the first time the Shenkman Presidential Campaign Collection has been on view outside of the East Coast where it has been seen at The George Washington University, College of William and Mary, and the University of Connecticut.
Designed as a prelude to the Peoria Riverfront Museum's vision to lead the nation in celebrations of America 250, the exhibition features the relics of more than 40 past presidential campaigns and gives historic context simultaneous to the national election season.
Collecting for three decades, Mark and Rosalind Shenkman if Greenwich, Connecticut have amassed more than 200 campaign-related textiles. Peoria's exhibition marks the largest number ever displayed in one place and was curated by the nation's leading expert and dealer of historic American flags, Jeff Bridgman of Pennsylvania, working closely with Peoria Riverfront Museum curator of art and the Center for American Decoys Zac Zetterberg.
Today, we examine and exhibit these historic treasures as a way to celebrate America’s past and study the evolution of American politics. As visitors look back on the symbols of contentious campaigns beginning two centuries ago, people are compelled to reflect on the similarities across time, leaving one with both confidence and wonder on the future of American democracy.
Faces of a Nation comes from the textile collection of Mark and Rosalind Shenkman.
Sponsored by: Prairie Home Alliance, Visionary Society, Friends of History
