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Since 2004, Sheryl Oring has acted as private secretary for over 5,000 people.

For her ongoing performance art project “I Wish To Say,” Oring has dressed as a 1960s office typist with a manual typewriter and taken dictation from members of the public who want to send a personalized note to the White House.

The Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia now has on exhibit “Secretary to the People,” a sampling of the thousands of postcards people have dictated to five presidential administrations (if you count President Donald Trump twice).

Here are a handful:

“In 12 short months you have turned the entire world from friend to foe,” wrote April Lynch of San Francisco to President Bush in February 2004. “Even in high school it’s hard to become unpopular that fast.”

“I am one of the few people in New York who appreciate what you are doing for New York in particular and America as a whole,” wrote Kingsley Akpabio Samuel later that same year in New York.

“I am not better off than I was four years ago. Government is intrusive. It is by and large a force for evil,” wrote a participant named Kennedy in 2012 at the end of President Obama’s first term. “I am glad you are good at basketball. My mother always said, Say something nice.”

“Dear future president,” wrote Lynn Moody of Ross, California, in 2008 during the primary season. “Before you walk into a meeting or answer the phone or respond to the press, would you take a deep breath and center your body so that you can access your best clarity and wisdom.”

Oring has staged dozens of public typing events over 21 years, dutifully typing every word without coercion or opinion. Photos on display in the West Gallery of the Free Library show her dressed in a 1960s skirt suit pinned with a bright floral broach and her red hair neatly upswept, leaning across her small typewriter to accurately catch every word from the stranger on the other side.

“That listening pose is the quintessential view of the project. It’s me listening intensively,” Oring said. “I’ve come to think of it as a type of radical listening.”

Over the course of the two-decade project, Oring has been asked to type postcards to candidates who ultimately did not achieve the White House:

A participant named Andres wrote to presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in April 2016:

“After seeing you in the South Bronkes (sp) this year I was inspired by your ability to bring great people together,” he wrote. “Never before have I been in such a grand secular audience that all strive for a better future.”

“Dear Mrs. Clinton,” wrote Catherine Pierre-Bon on the same day. “I am one of the French translators of Walt Whitman. I wish you are going to fight for freedom in all senses as he did.”

In August 2024, when then-candidate Trump was campaigning to return to the White House, Deborah Scipione, of Philadelphia, addressed him.

“Looking forward to you being in office again,” she wrote “To make America beautiful.”

The Free Library exhibition is not the only retrospective of Oring’s democratic art practice. A similar show just closed in Monmouth University in New Jersey, another is on view in St. Petersburg, Florida, and next week the Liberty Museum in Old City will include her notecards in an exhibition about free speech.

But the library hits home for Oring. The exhibition features a series of hand-typed library cards Oring had as a girl in her hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota. They turned up in a forgotten box in Oring’s parents’ house.

“This was an amazing find because libraries were such a critical part of my childhood,” Oring said. “They were a place that I went to escape, a place that I went to dream and think about different places. I grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and I couldn’t wait to leave. The library gave me a view of what the outside world might be like.”

She left Grand Forks to become a journalist, reporting for newspapers in California and Germany. She began the “I Wish To Say” project shortly after returning from Europe and launching a career in academics. Most recently, Oring was Dean of Art at the University of the Arts, a position she held until UArts abruptly closed last year.

Oring staged a “I Wish To Say” typing session in the Free Library on Election Day 2024, asking passersby to write a note to whomever they believed would occupy the White House in 2025. Most wrote notes addressed to Kamala Harris, but not all.

Oring uses old-fashioned carbon paper in the typewriter to make a copy of each postcard. She keeps the copy, and the original is given to the participant who may or may not choose to mail it to the White House. It’s impossible to know if the cards have ever been seen by a president of anyone on his staff.

That’s not the point.

Free Library curator Suzanna Urminska said exhibitions like this one allow people to see what other people are thinking.

“Here we are in Philadelphia, birthplace of democracy, at an institution that also espouses a lot of democratic values,” she said. “What do you have to do, but to listen to one another?”

Urminska points out that the Latin root of the word “secretary” is secretarius, or confidante, a keeper of secrets. She believes the project only works because Oring is playing the part of a matronly figure in a vintage style from when offices had typing pools made up of women.

“It is linked with this idea of being able to listen to a person’s secrets,” she said. “That’s a gendered act of being a woman who’s here to listen.”

“Secretary to the People” will be on view at the Free Library for the first 100 days of the new Trump administration.