A disaster fuels the future of firefighting in Philadelphia.

We understand the symbolism, but what about the courage behind making the American flag?

Plus the making of American art and the museum where it's housed.

Welcome to You Oughta Know.

For 250 years, Philadelphia has been a city of groundbreaking firsts.

One of them being the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

This magnificent hall is where one of the greatest collections of American art resides.

But at the ground level of this historic building is where art is made.

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1805.

It is considered America's first museum and art school in the nation.

It was specifically built to support our dual mission as a museum and art school.

As you can tell from the architectural details, it really symbolizes Philadelphia's industrialization at the time, mixing both the steel as well as the stone architectural features.

On the second floor of the building is where our art galleries are.

The first floor will be all studio where we train the artists.

We're here in the historic landmark buildings cast hall.

This is where we see our collection of casts used in our students first year cast drawing.

These casts are used typically to understand the figurative body in traditional European academic art training.

It's really cool.

I know, I know it's amazing.

The Cass Hall has been at the center of the Academy School for 220 years.

It's this incredibly rare jewel in America.

The morning lights coming through the skylights.

You feel like you've walked into a sacred space.

The first casts were purchased really as soon as we opened in 1805 and they're all from original molds made from the original sculptures in the Vatican Museum, the British Museum and so forth.

The idea was students would learn form, structure, value and drawing technique.

And of course it's also based on the idea that the academy education, which is unique, increasingly so in this country, is based on foundation skills, very solid, very strong, in observation, structure, intellectual understanding of form, space and depth, color, and then moving it towards ultimately through our sequential classes and years into creativity.

The Academy, as a first, one of many firsts, admitted women and students of color really right from the beginning, which was very unusual actually.

It was rather restrictive.

That's really, really good.

In this very room that we're in was a classroom where Cecilia Bowe and Mary Cassatt studied.

You know, it was a fascinating sociocultural thing that's always been very open and inclusive, right from the very, very beginning.

Now we have students from everywhere who are here in one big happy community.

Hey, how's it going?

Good, nice crosshatching.

In 2002, the Academy expanded to a new building, the Hamilton Building.

Here is where we have individual studios for our students, as well as our shops, which include the printmaking shop, papermaking lab, and sculpture and foundry shops.

The foundry has played an important part here at the academy in that it's able for us to explore traditional modes of casting figures or casting other sculptures.

We have a long lineage of foundry workers within the city of Philadelphia.

With the academy switching to a more vocational style school, the foundry is probably one of the best places in the academy to get people a job right out of school.

And it's skills that are not taught in the city.

You have to leave the state in order to find another foundry where students are getting taught the skills that you learn through foundry work.

You can see the bronze was poured in.

We keep on banging and banging, and we have a bronze element to a sculpture in there.

It looks like some sort of tentacle that somebody's cast.

We also have stone carving up here, which is our most traditional craft-based sculptural form.

(hammering) Woodworking, which tends to be a little more traditional fabrication, and metalworking.

What's unique about PAFA is its focus on hand-eye skill, direct observation, and recreation of that observation.

We don't have any 3D printers or laser cutters.

Everything is eye to hand to machine, whether that be with a paintbrush or with a pencil.

Or with a chisel.

I'm here now with Leah Triplett, the co curator of a nation of artists.

Papa just reopened its doors to the public.

How important is it for Papa to reopen with such a comprehensive collection of American art?

It was really important to us to have a really holistic, broad view of what is American art, what are the American artist voices, and how are they related to the founding of the country.

I'm looking around and I'm seeing a mix of genres.

How did you go about curating this collection?

A Nation of Artists is a collaboration between three really different institutions or groups.

There's PAFA, there's the Milton Family Collection, which is a really incredible collection of American art never presented to the public in this way before.

And we also worked with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and their American Art Department to make this happen.

So it's a lot of cross-city collaboration which is really exciting.

We have work from you know very early in the country's founding right up against work that was made as recently as a few months ago.

The exhibition is displayed in different galleries throughout the museum.

How does that create a unique experience for visitors?

This building was built for the centennial of the country, opened in 1876.

We have completely unique sight lines, so we really wanted to lean into the kind of idiosyncraticness of the building in and of itself.

What's the idea of this room?

This room we've been calling sort of our flag room.

It's looking at a lot of different examples of how artists are using kind of the color or the pattern of the American flag in very different ways.

Sometimes to celebrate, but sometimes to critique as well.

One of the inspirations for this room was the legend of George Washington asking Betsy Ross, "Can you make a flag for the 13 colonies?"

And she responds, "I don't know, but I'll try."

And that's something that we wanted to really think about throughout the exhibition.

The American experiment is just that.

It's an experiment that we're always kind of iterating on and improving on, hopefully.

As the birthplace of the first American flag, I met with the brave Philadelphia woman credited with making the first flag with stars and stripes.

(upbeat music) Welcome good friends to my home, the house of Betsy Ross.

Betsy, thank you so much for having me inside your home.

I am so pleased to welcome thee here.

Do you feel a little out of place?

Well, I did not mean to judge, but thou does look a little bit uncomfortable.

Is it possible that I could allow thee to feel a little bit more what it's like to live in my own time?

I would love that.

Let's try it.

Wow!

I feel so much better.

Thou looks much better also.

Now we can have a proper chat together.

How did you meet General George Washington?

It was in the fall of 1774 when he was here in Philadelphia with the Congress.

Friends think Washington just came through the doorway by chance.

Oh no, no.

When my first husband, John Ross, was alive, John and I had taken a commission from Washington to make him a lovely set of bed hangings.

And the hangings are those curtains that come down from the top of the bed.

So when Washington took those curtains back to his home in Virginia, he knew that my husband John and I were patriots.

We were still under the authority of the crown and therefore making a flag against the king could be considered as a treasonous activity.

And therefore, when he had the need for a flag, he was not just going to go to any upholsterer.

He came to someone he knew, someone he trusted, me.

- Did you make the first flag?

Did you sew the first American flag?

- What is first?

And as I shall love to tell to my grandchildren, how the first flag that I made, perhaps it was the first one that joined stars and stripes together as the stripes were already being found on flags even used by Washington.

The stars that are on the flags, what was your contribution to the stars?

I was so hoping they would ask me that question.

Well, this flag had six pointed stars.

But I immediately recognized a five pointed star would be better.

Why is that better?

Honestly, I can make it with only one scissor snip.

Oh, so it's an efficiency.

Yes, a woman who understands.

Now, open up that little triangle, make sure that everyone can see it.

Oh.

She has done it.

Friend Shirley, I shall hire thee as an apprentice.

Now, Washington recognized, just as I've said, the efficiency that I, Betsy Ross, could have by making the stars not six-pointed like his, but five-pointed.

War is about the exchange of power, and once the British left, the American army came in, and I have not stopped making flags since then.

Leah, this room has paintings about women.

What ties them all together in this gallery?

This room is depicting lots of different types of labor, particularly women's labor going back into the 19th century, working as domestic servants in the painting by Tarbell here, hailing the fairy, some of our favorites, as well as caregiving and nurturing that is more traditionally assigned to the feminine role.

You can see that in works like the Mary Cassatt painting behind me.

This is a portrait of Cecilia Bowe.

Cecilia Bowe was PAPA's first full-time female faculty member in the painting department.

So at a time when women not only weren't still not being trained and not being employed as artistic teachers, Pafa was employing her full time.

And this is her palette.

This is one of her palettes.

This is probably a teaching palette, showing students how to lay out color and pigment, how to mix things up.

Now to another trailblazing woman, a pioneer in the courtroom.

[MUSIC] First time I met Judge Timmon, I was interviewing for a position with her.

I was interested in becoming her judicial law clerk.

Everything I heard about Judge Timmon became quite obvious.

She was not just smart, but brilliant, tremendous energy.

I knew that she was a groundbreaker.

- It was my lack of ability to continue on with the dance career that brought me into law.

It occurred to me that maybe I should go to law school.

The Defender Association in Philadelphia was founded in 1934 because of the Gideon decision, which required that everybody charged with a crime was entitled to a lawyer, and if you couldn't afford one, the state had to supply it.

And they got a grant to hire 15 lawyers, and they were gonna hire one woman.

I was the first woman staff member.

I was always interested more in criminal law than in other types of law.

I was very happy to be able to get this job, and I immediately was sent to court.

It was still weird and strange to have a woman criminal lawyer.

In those days there was nowhere to go from the defender.

The only way to get ahead in the criminal justice area was two ways and one was to be in private practice and the other was to go to the DA's office.

I was very interested in people and the whole criminal justice system which I thought needed a lot of reform.

She fought for women to have better treatment in the criminal justice system whether they were defendants or were they were coming there as victims or witnesses.

As I matured in the system I suddenly began to think of myself as a judge and I had a long career as a criminal lawyer.

I had the privilege of being named first assistant in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.

My mentor Judge Carolyn Engel Temin actually became the first assistant in the Philadelphia DA's office in 2018, two years after I had left.

And it's very interesting that our paths took a similar route and we wound up holding that position in the Philadelphia DA's office.

She took me under her wing in a different way so maybe I got a little bit lucky that I was nurtured and mentored at the same time but I think that that was open to everyone.

She would love to be able to help anyone she could.

Don't make too many plans that are stuck in concrete.

Wait for the magic because my career has just been a series of events that I could never have planned for and never have predicted.

I'm 91 years old and I'm waiting for the next thing that will happen.

We are inside Geometry, Industry, and the Modern Imagination, which is a gallery really thinking about how technology and industry and new experiences in the 21st century and 20th century kind of change artistic expression over time.

How are we seeing the evolution of contemporary art in this gallery?

This gallery is really presenting examples of artists working with new materials or older materials in a completely new way.

We also have artists working with things like wire, so more of an industrial material.

This is a Merrin Hassinger work from just a few years ago, and then that's paired with our Jasper Johns flag from the Middleton family collection.

And he's using encaustic, which again in mid-century is a pretty new material for artists to be using in painting.

Innovation has always pushed what's possible.

Before the Wright brothers took to the skies, aviation was already being explored.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard was a little bit of a showman, but we needed him to push the limits of what's possible.

It's such a historical event.

This didn't happen anywhere else.

It landed right here in Duffer Township.

So I think our responsibility is to tell the history of it.

Experimentation that was going on in France was more scientific and early balloon pilots captured the interest of the public.

And the first balloon flight in 1783 was by the Montgolfier brothers.

And then in 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard's flight over the English Channel, Benjamin Franklin had spoke to him about the idea of flying and what the possibilities were for military purposes, for mail, for travel, weather.

So in 1793, Jean-Pierre Blanchard chose Philadelphia because of the relationship with Benjamin Franklin to do the first air voyage here.

Ben Franklin, when he was in France, witnessed it, comes back to America and invites Blanchard to come over here to do a flight, and regretfully, old Ben passed away before he took off.

He took off from the Walnut Street prison, and he sold tickets to it, too, to try to pay for all his expenses.

And there were four future presidents there.

Plus, George Washington himself was there.

Probably all the dignitaries from the State House at the time.

Philly had about 50,000 people population back then.

They think that the majority of the folks witnessed that flight.

It created such a buzz to watch him take off and just say, "Hey, goodbye, see you whenever we see you," not knowing where you're gonna land.

And then the scientific part of it, making that balloon, pouring sulfuric acid over iron to create the gas.

He had an altimeter, a barometer.

He took all these scientific experiments.

He even had five bottles of wine in the basket.

But such a story.

We're here at the Athenlium where the grounds of the Walnut Street Prison was.

Franklin Bosch stuck a little dog in the basket for company.

Blanchard did not speak English and he was given a letter of passage from the then president George Washington to be received well from his landing site.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard flew a 45-minute flight over the Delaware River and landed in Deptford, New Jersey.

The Klamath Oak was a meeting place for the Lenape tribe.

It was also a meeting place for other colonists.

Blanchard is looking for a field to land, and that's where he winds up landing, not knowing about the Klamath Oak.

One farmer seen him coming down, and then another farmer was in the area, and he comes running over.

When he lands with a bottle of wine, a dog, and the name Washington, kept him safe.

He becomes friends, and they actually help him package up the balloon.

They put it on a wagon.

They stop and eat lunch.

He gets back to Philadelphia at 7 o'clock that night after landing at 10 o'clock in the morning.

That's hard to do now sometimes.

It's on all our letterheads.

It's on our street signs.

I mean we really try to publicize it.

We want to educate people to the fact that this happened, the first flight in America.

Lee I understand this is not the original Poffa building.

No we had a few homes before 1876 around Philadelphia but this has been our home since 1876 and again this building was designed for the showing of artworks much like these two incredible monumental Benjamin West paintings.

Now in 1846 the original Poffa building burned down.

Yes, yes our original building burned down.

Fireman actually saved this painting by cutting it out of the frame after the canvas had been singed, rolling up and taking it out of the building.

I just love the scale and it's perfect there are two, one for each wall.

We really again wanted to place works in context with these two paintings that kind of amplify how students have learned from these particular figural arrangements over time.

Years before that 1846 fire Ben Franklin laid the foundation for fighting fires in Philly.

I've been a Philadelphia firefighter for 26 years.

Philadelphia in 1736 was a very little town.

It extended basically between the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers and from Vine Street on the north to South Street.

The population, well in 1752 it was 15,000 so it was probably about 10,000.

The city from the very beginning recognized the importance of planning and making certain that it was as fire safe as possible.

William Penn directed his surveyors to create fire blocks for the city which is why we have the squares.

Washington Square, Franklin Square, etc.

to keep fire from reaching across multiple blocks.

The city also purchased firefighting equipment and they directed inhabitants to keep a couple of fire buckets on hand so that if fire broke out everyone was expected to turn out with their fire buckets and help fight the fire through those bucket brigades.

Back in the volunteers they just had a garden hose or at that just a hand engine where they're actually just pumping and hoping the water from the engine would generate and penetrate the dwelling.

So Benjamin Franklin came to Philadelphia in 1723 and he had come from Boston, a city that already had these mutual aid fire clubs that responded in the event of fire and they would help basically each other in the event that fire broke out.

So he published an editorial basically saying we have equipment enough and water enough in the event of a fire.

What we lack is a system of organization.

And that editorial in the Pennsylvania Gazette gave rise to the establishment by Franklin and his friends of the Union Fire Company on December 7th of 1736.

It was a small organization.

It was as much social as it was a firefighting organization.

So the desk behind me is known as the watch desk.

That's common in any firehouse around the world.

This is where firefighters would take turns sitting to greet the public because this is a public building and to hike out the runs as they would come in over the Joker System.

These are very heroic people that put their lives on the line to protect people's lives and property and not receive nothing other than a thank you.

So the equipment was small, it was wooden, it was all hand-drawn until the steam fire engines came in in the second half of the 19th century, at which point horses came into the firehouses.

It wasn't really until the water works was established, making water pressure much more significant, that fueled the rise of the technology to build better engines.

With better engines, you got bigger engines, and all of a sudden you needed fire houses.

The other one at that time was also the hand engine.

That's water that was put inside of the pump and was hand pumped on either side.

And after that we graduated from the hand to the steam pumper which was used to generate pressure in the hose line by the steam.

And then we came into the automotive era which we have here as a 1926 American LaFrance which was operated by the department before we get into the more modern apparatuses which we know today.

These were people that lived in the community so you were servicing your community they were tradespeople.

It was an honor to serve at that time to be a volunteer for your community.

I love the skylight in here, but skylights in museums are pretty unusual.

Totally.

This is one of the really wonderful things about our 1876 Furness building.

We have skylights in each of our galleries.

Some of them are covered in the exhibition for the safety of the artwork and to maybe create more of a little bit more of an atmosphere.

How does this room represent American art?

- Oof, that's a big question.

I mean, I think this room is really thinking about some major themes and exciting moments in the last century of American art making.

Joan Mitchell is right behind me.

She is very active in that first generation of abstract expressionists, alongside people that are maybe more known like de Kooning over here, and then Jackson Pollock also in this gallery.

We wanted to show that alongside some more contemporary work, particularly from our indigenous contemporary artists.

Well, I love that piece.

This is a work by Diane Whitehawk called She Gives Quiet Strength.

Diane is of the Lakota tradition, and she's using a diamond motif that's from the Lakota tradition.

It's the wapala shape.

And it's really meaning something like connection or unity or togetherness.

How long can people see A Nation of Artists?

People can see A Nation of Artists through September 5, 2027.

Please do come early and often.

We have a lot of programming, which you can find on our website.

We do have 283 objects in this exhibition, which is quite large.

So there's a lot to look at, but also a lot to meditate on as well.

Leah, thank you so much for being my guide today.

Thank you so much.

This is lovely.

We hope you enjoyed this small sample of Philly firsts and be sure to check out the ones around the city detailing 52 weeks of firsts here in Philadelphia.

Alright that is our show.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Have a good night.

[music]