On the Ropes: Vintage Boxing Cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection

Boxing, a combat sport with ancient origins, was wildly popular in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

This exhibition will feature vintage boxing cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection of printed ephemera that date from the 1880s to the 1950s, exploring the ways in which images of boxing foreground issues of nationality, race, ethnicity, celebrity, and notions of masculinity in the United States during the period.

Works in other media to be included in the exhibition, such as John Hoppner's painting Richard Humphreys, the Boxer, attest to the ubiquity of boxing imagery in the visual culture of eighteenth-century England. The later emergence of the sport as a source of both entertainment and inquiry across the globe will be reflected in diverse works by Richmond Barthé, George Bellows, Lola Cueto, Eadweard Muybridge, and August Sander.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website