Exhibitions
Exhibition News
Monday, April 28, 2025 - 8:30am to Sunday, September 28, 2025 - 5:00pm
“SENSATION! Reported Bodies in 19th-Century American Media” is an exhibit about your body: your eyes, ears, nostrils, skin, and tongue. It’s also about that strange, seductive sixth sense, your imagination. How does the news touch your imagination to make your body feel? Today, “sensational” writing is an exaggerated, titillating representation of sex or crime. In the 1800s, though, “sensational” simply meant creating a strong impact on the senses. When we recover this historical definition, many newspapers begin to seem sensational. An online version of the exhibition is also available.
Friday, March 28, 2025 - 8:30am to Wednesday, October 1, 2025 - 5:30pm
The exhibition is displayed in the Poorvu Corridor, outside of the Gilmore Music Library entrance, within Sterling Memorial Library. Celebrating the life of Yale’s Willie Ruff in conjunction with Yale School of Music’s Willie Ruff Memorial Concert. The exhibit features oral histories recorded by Willie speaking with other legendary Black musicians and composers. These oral histories are part of the Gilmore Music Library’s Oral History of American Music project and is presented in partnership with the Yale School of Music’s March 29th Willie Ruff Memorial Concert.
Monday, March 24, 2025 - 12:00pm to Sunday, September 7, 2025 - 5:00pm
Exhibition Opening Event: The opening reception is on Thurs., March 27, at 4:30 in the Hanke Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library. Free and open to the public. Onitsha Market Literature—named after a city east of the Niger River—emerged in the early 1950s. The popular pamphlet style soon spread to other centers throughout the then British colony of Nigeria. These ephemeral publications circulated widely throughout the busy marketplace, and writers intended them to be both educating and entertaining for the common people. The pamphlets in this exhibition contain the voices of an emerging
Monday, March 24, 2025 - 8:00am to Sunday, March 8, 2026 - 6:00pm
A new exhibition to be installed at the Schwarzman Center, Shining Light on Truth: Black at Yale & in New Haven Lives at Yale & in New Haven, will illuminate ongoing research that recovers the essential role of Black people throughout Yale and New Haven history. The exhibition puts back at the center of local storytelling people who have always been central to local history. It celebrates Black community building, resistance, and resilience on campus and in New Haven. The show will include nearly 100 images of Yale’s earliest Black students from the 1800s and early 1900s, many of whom
Monday, March 10, 2025 - 8:30am to Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 5:00pm
Imagine a world in which similarity is the foundation of everything. That idea, inspired by the writings of cultural theorist Walther Benjamin (1892–1940) and Yale Professor Paul North, is the basis for the new exhibition in the Cushing Rotunda: A Cosmos of Similarity. Showcasing lesser-known works from the founding collection of the Medical Historical Library, this captivating new display charts a rich intellectual history in which mathematics, theology, natural philosophy, art, and medicine intertwine. It outlines a history of similarity and knowledge production in Europe between 1482 and
Wednesday, March 5, 2025 - 8:30am to Friday, August 22, 2025 - 5:00pm
Samuel Johnson defined “spectacle” in 1755 as “a show; a gazing stock; anything exhibited to the view as eminently remarkable.” This exhibition will explore the range of spectacular shows that were offered to the fee-paying public in Georgian London, from exhibitions of paintings, to scientific demonstrations, to the display of wondrous animals. These shows were such an integral part of the visual culture that Horace Walpole complained in 1770, “The rage to see these exhibitions is so great, that sometimes one cannot pass through the streets where they are … it is incredible what sums are
Monday, February 24, 2025 - 9:00am to Sunday, August 10, 2025 - 5:00pm
Exhibition Opening Event : Feb. 26, 5-7 p.m., free and open to the public The Qur’an declares that God taught humanity the use of the pen. Taking this commandment to heart, Muslim scholars systematically organized and extended almost every field of knowledge in astonishing new ways. For over a thousand years, this pursuit of knowledge set in motion exchanges with other artistic, religious, and scholarly communities. Through themes such as literature, religion, and science, this exhibition reveals that Islamic civilization has never been a homogeneous phenomenon: ideas and artistic practices