Eighth year PhD candidate Taylor Bailey has curated First-Class Flora: A Stamp Collection of Medicinal Plants, an outdoor exhibition at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Drawing from the large stamp collection of chemical industry market researcher Richard Marston Lawrence (1906-1991), the exhibit poses the question: Why do we collect what we collect?
In its answer to that provocation, First-Class Flora suggests that stamps have served as visual emblems that communicate the history and professional cultures of science. Lawrence’s stamps, for example, bear the images of 220 individual medicinal plants from across the globe, each of which he classed into 26 categories of pharmaceutically useful substances. This kind of schematicity was a key component of Lawrence’s own work in the US chemical industry.
Bailey, who currently serves as Cain Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute, worked with colleagues Jahna Auerbach and Scott Bowe to digitize and install the exhibit. It will be on view until April 2027.
Image courtesy of the Science History Institute