January 24, 2025
Kristin Hunt/for PhillyVoice
Sheryl Oring dresses as a 1960s secretary, partially in tribute to her grandmother, when she takes down letters to the president from people on the street. She has been typing them since 2004.
Every year since George W. Bush won reelection to the White House, Sheryl Oring has taken her vintage typewriter to the streets and asked passersby a question: Would you like to send a letter to the president?
A lot of them do. Oring says she has transcribed well over 5,000 messages from Americans across 30 states since she began the project in 2004. The artist, who dresses in the style of a '60s secretary to suit her typist role, always hands the letter over to its author to post to the president. But she keeps a carbon copy for herself and snaps a Polaroid of the constituent she just met to add to her massive catalog.
Some of it is now on display at the Parkway Central Library, where it will remain for the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. The Free Library branch will officially welcome the "Secretary to the People" exhibit with an opening party and artist Q&A on Thursday.
Oring, who splits her time between Philadelphia and North Carolina, didn't initially see herself as an artist. She had worked as a journalist for many years in San Francisco, where, she says, "women and people of color weren't getting into the front page very much." A subsequent six-year stay in Berlin inspired her to dabble in visual art. When she returned to the United States in 2004, she developed her ongoing project "I Wish to Say" as a means to reconnect with the American political discourse and give ordinary, overlooked people — the ones who didn't make front page news — a voice.
"Every single time I set up and type, there's something incredible that happens," Oring said.
Oring sets up her typewriter in public parks, libraries and schools, inviting pedestrians to stop by her makeshift "office." The messages she collects often reflect their time. When Oring started out, she heard a lot about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, gun violence in schools is an increasingly common concern. Visitors to the library will see discussion of seemingly every hot button issue in America on the pages on display, each stamped with messages like "URGENT" and "IMPORTANT" in red ink.
Blow-up copies of letters that Sheryl Oring transcribed in 2017, following Donald Trump's first election to the presidency, reflect immigrant anxieties.
"People talk about how they're not used to being listened to and how meaningful that is," Oring said. "There was a young woman in Chicago who came up to my desk, and she was hesitant to start. And then as we kind of talked a bit, she composed her message and then she was super emotional and she said, 'No one's ever listened to me like this before.' That response... is something I encounter over and over."
Along with the typed messages, display cases contain Oring's old press badges and pieces of her retro uniform. (Her grandmother, a secretary for the University of Maryland, served as sartorial inspiration.) The exhibit moves chronologically from Oring's first secretarial sessions to her last pop-up in Philadelphia on the day of the 2024 presidential election. Many messages collected on that day reference or address America's first woman president, a landmark that still hasn't been realized.
Over the course of this project, Oring has published books and zines, taught at the University of the Arts and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and raised a 16-year-old daughter. What keeps her coming back, she says, is the transformation she's witnessed countless times from people who feel heard or even inspired to act.
"If I've touched one person with this project, I've changed the world in a small way," she said. "And I absolutely know that's the case."
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