Exhibitions

Exhibition News

Saturday, February 15, 2025 - 12:00pm to 4:30pm
A special community day at the New haven Museum, 115 Whitney Avenue, will be held Saturday, February 15, 2025, offering tours and conversation around the New Haven Museum’s exhibition, “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery,” prior to its closing on Saturday, March 1, 2025. Presented by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Library, the exhibition highlights the essential role of enslaved and free Black people in New Haven and at Yale. Visitors will be encouraged to tour the exhibition beginning at 12:00 p.m., with members of the exhibition team available for
Monday, January 13, 2025 - 9:00am to Friday, February 28, 2025 - 5:00pm
Visits to Yale by Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King are documented in Yale Library’s Manuscripts and Archives collections. In 1959, Dr. King was invited to speak on “The Future of Integration.” He returned to Yale in 1964 to receive an honorary degree–he had been released on bail from the St. Augustine, Florida, jail just two days before. Coretta Scott King was named the first Frances Blanshard Fellow at Yale in 1969. She spoke to a standing-room-only crowd in Woolsey Hall on the role of campus unrest in addressing social injustices. Also visit the online exhibit.
Friday, October 25, 2024 - 12:00pm to Monday, March 10, 2025 - 12:00pm
This multimedia exhibit explores key aspects of Yale’s own Charles E. Ives, Yale College 1898. Learn about the innovative composer, his family, and his profound impact on American music in the 20th century and beyond. The exhibit is on view in the hallway video screens and exhibition cases in front of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Curated by Suzanne Lovejoy, Music Librarian for Research and Access Services, and James Sinclair, Executive Editor, Charles Ives Society
Monday, October 14, 2024 - 8:00am to Sunday, April 20, 2025 - 5:00pm
“The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho’s Encounter with the Modernist Imagination” interrogates how modernist interpretations of Sappho’s poetics have been integral to our contemporary understanding of the elusive poet. Sappho has been many things: the only woman among nine lyric poets canonized in antiquity, a spurned lover driven to suicide by the boatman Phaon, and a queer icon whose homeland boasts credit for the word “lesbian.” “It was Sappho who first called eros ‘bittersweet,’ ” the classicist and poet Anne Carson writes. “No one who has been in love disputes her.” Curated by Daniel Zhang ‘26
Monday, October 14, 2024 - 8:00am to Sunday, April 20, 2025 - 5:00pm
“Who Shot the Tiger?: Performing Imperialism in India” explores how tiger hunts recur in 19th-British visual culture. Appropriated from Indian courtly tradition, colonial depiction of tiger hunts enforced British imperial power. Tracing the emergence of this motif into the English cultural consciousness, questions of the archive’s complicity in imperialism arise. The violence is perpetuated by materials held in Yale’s collections. Radical reimagination is urgent for these endangered animals. Who will look and change these tigers before it is too late? Curated by Catherine Kausikan ’25
Monday, September 9, 2024 - 9:00am to Sunday, May 11, 2025 - 5:00pm
The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) was architect Louis I. Kahn‘s last design. Founded by Paul Mellon ‘29 for the study and display of British art, the YCBA was the first U.S. museum to incorporate retail store fronts at street level. Inside the museum, Kahn’s use of daylight and natural materials reached its apotheosis. To celebrate the YCBA’s reopening in spring 2025, this exhibition presents photographs, letters, and sketches from Yale’s repositories. Curated by Kathy Winsor Bohlman, Architecture Records Archivist; Jessica Quagliaroli, Processing Archivist
Sunday, August 18, 2024 - 9:00am to Sunday, March 2, 2025 - 5:00pm
“Amnesia”—a 1986 work of interactive science fiction—was an early attempt to bring video games into the realm of literary art by translating a novelist’s script into a medium that readers could only experience by interacting with a computer. Visitors can play the game on workstations in the Hanke Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library and in Bass Library, using Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) software.