Satire and Social Criticism:
Prints by William Hogarth from the Collection
The Joel and Lila Harnett Fellow is responsible for
co-curating two upcoming exhibitions alongside Richard Waller, executive director of University of Richmond Museums (URM). As the 2019-2020 Harnett Fellow, I was responsible for this exhibition, Satire and Social Criticism, as well as a coinciding contextual exhibition, The Age of Hogarth and Piranesi.
In my first week as the Harnett Fellow, I devoured Hogarth’s subversive “Modern Moral Stories,” in which a blunt, didactic narrative is often subtly contradicted by systemic critique. Hogarth, if you recognize his nuance, declares that his characters’ misfortune cannot be entirely attributable to moral failure. He gives his audience the opportunity to look outside of the character at the systems and power dynamics at play.
For example, the series Industry and Idleness follows the intertwined lives of two apprentices, Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle. A quick perusal of the prints gives the impression that the Good apprentice’s innate desire to work begets him the prominent position of Lord Mayor of London, while the Bad apprentice is hung for his lack thereof. A closer reading reveals a condemnation of the system: the Good apprentice achieves fortune through a strategic marriage and nepotism. This series, literally presented to apprentices by their masters as a manual for success, questions the existence of a meritocracy.
“His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at—his prints we read.”
Google Slides in the Gallery
William Hogarth’s genius must be deciphered by modern viewers—the topical dramas played out in print, the subtle signifiers of social status, and the implications of an identifiable street corner would have been immediately recognizable to contemporary viewers.
An interactive technology feature in the gallery could pinpoint small details and extrapolate on their relevance without forcing a brick of text on the viewer. To do this, I innovated basic Google Slides tools to develop a free, accessible and easy to share gallery feature. To read more about the evolution of this feature, click the poster to the right.
