News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Listening to Will Wilson’s Portraits (Yale Herald)

    November 18, 2019

    Today wet-plate collodion photography is, unsurprisingly, scarce, enabling the materialization of Wilson’s three figures in PNGB to serve as a bait-and-switch: their initial perceived age soon deteriorates into their present reality. Unlike in Curtis’s images, each subject has chosen their own pose and clothing, has written their own caption, and has been gifted the aluminum plate — the reproductions we see in the YUAG exhibition are archival pigment prints from a high-resolution scan of the original, on loan from the Beinecke. The photographic exchange is literal, as is Wilson’s reinscription of Indigenous culture, both shifting the seat of influence towards equality.

  • How one man’s family photo archive led to a global ‘family’ album

    November 15, 2019

    "Yale has some of the most amazing archival collections in the world, along with outstanding librarians and archivists,” said Harris. “I want my students to see the relationship between their own family narratives and the public record. I love being a conduit so that people can see the potentiality of themselves as architects of the future, and we begin by valuing the past.”

  • ‘Shape, contour, and respect’ — 200 years of indigenous art on view at Yale

    November 11, 2019

    It is the first exhibition to display indigenous works from the Yale Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The show features basketry, beadwork, drawings, photographs, pottery, textiles, and wooden carvings from the early 19th century to the present day, representing more than 40 indigenous nations. It presents the objects as works of art, not historical artifacts.

  • Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme on the greatest book collector of all time (The Biblio File podcast)

    November 10, 2019

    Earlier this year the Beinecke Library hosted an exhibition entitled Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance. It takes its name from the history of “arrant book-lovers” written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin. "It follows these lovers of the book through four case studies, observing the powerful and often unexpected relationships of books with their readers, owners, authors, collectors, and creators."

  • YUAG Walks The Walk (New Haven Independent)

    November 8, 2019

    Curated by Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa–Cree), B.A. 2018, and Leah Tamar Shrestinian, B.A. 2018, with Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe), B.A. 2019, Place, Nations, Generations, Beings uses pieces from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Books Library to dive incisively into the complex and devastating history of North American indigenous people.

  • In All Their Glory (zip06)

    November 6, 2019

    McCleary points to a photo from The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, taken by Diné Navajo photographer Will Wilson of a woman, titled “Casey Camp Horinek, Citizen Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, “Zhutni,” Tribal Councilwoman, Leader of Scalp Dance Society, Sundancer, Delegate to UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Matriarch of Wonderful Family (Grandmother, Companion, Mother, Sister), Defender of Mother Earth.” Wilson’s subjects wrote their own labels. “The photographer allows folks to choose how want to dress and pose, and enabled them to write their own caption,” McCleary says.

  • ‘From East to West’ traces 170-year history of Yale’s Chinese Collection

    November 1, 2019

    In June 1849, the Yale College librarian received a three-month-old letter from Canton, China, informing him that the sender, an American missionary printer named Samuel Wells Williams, had purchased six Chinese classical texts for the Yale library. The handstitched texts, about 90 volumes in all, arrived in August at a cost of $9.50 plus an extra dollar for freight. The newly arrived books marked the beginning of Yale Library’s Chinese Collection, the first such collection at an American university and now one of the largest and most renowned Chinese-language collections outside China.

  • Into the archives! (Yale Daily News)

    October 31, 2019

    "Last spring, I sat in the Beinecke Library’s Reading Room, poring over a manuscript copy of Hannah Crafts’ “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” I saw the meandering cursive writings on the page and where she must have pressed her pen harder into the paper, creating blotches of ink. I was writing a paper about the novel for my English seminar and had read the version I’d gotten from the Yale Bookstore for class. But seeing the manuscript version brought the text alive in a way it hadn’t been before; I felt closer to the author, closer to the words."

  • Word Processing (Dally Nutmeg)

    October 30, 2019

    A ristotle, in his Poetics (ca. 330 B.C.), claimed that a poet’s function is not “to relate what has happened, but what may happen…” In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…” And in the last line of his poem “Ars Poetica” (1926), Archibald MacLeish ventured, “A poem should not mean / But be.” None of these famous descriptions, however, are a match for Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry and the Avant-Garde, currently on view at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which shows just how “experimental” poetry can be and leaves you considering just what makes a poem a poem.

  • First major exhibition of indigenous art at the YUAG (Yale Daily News)

    October 30, 2019

    A new exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery begins with a bowl and ends with a basket — both works by Mohegan artists — to acknowledge the Quinnipiac land the University is built upon. This exhibit, titled “Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art,” will go on view Friday, Nov.1. The YUAG’s first major exhibition of indigenous North American art brings together objects from the YUAG, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It is entirely student-curated.

  • Exploring James Baldwin’s celebrity and mystery at the Beinecke

    October 28, 2019

    Robert Reid-Pharr ’89 M.A., ’91 M.A./M.Phil., ’94 Ph.D. discovered writer James Baldwin long before he set foot on Yale’s campus. “I read ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ as a 14-year-old,” Reid-Pharr says. “It was the first literature that spoke to me as a black person in a conservative, black, religious family.”

  • David (Jhave) Johnston’s Machine Poetry (Yale Herald)

    October 28, 2019

    I'd never been to a reading in the Beinecke before, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the four ambitiously long, semi-circular lines of chairs on the mezzanine were mostly full by the time I arrived at 4:55 p.m. Perhaps I walked into Jhave Johnston’s reading on Oct. 17 overly expecting to have the words to describe what I would see, knowing as I did that the reading/performance was part of the current Beinecke exhibition, Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry & the Avant-Garde

  • Yale Younger Poet prizewinners and judges discuss the honor and their craft

    October 21, 2019

    For a poet who is little known, winning an award like the Yale Younger Poets Prize can be life changing, noted Airea D. Matthews, who earned that honor in 2016. In a panel discussion on Oct. 11, Matthews and several other poets who have won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition agreed that the prize, awarded since 1919 by Yale University Press, has hugely benefitted their careers, but some said there can be a downside to prizewinning.

  • The ketubah: A document of devotion (The Canadian Jewish News)

    October 18, 2019

    It’s not too often that you find a legal document that can also be a stunning work of art illustrating love and commitment. The ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, has for thousands of years detailed a husband’s obligations to his wife during marriage and his responsibilities in the case of divorce. Beyond that, the ketubah has become a prized piece of Judaica which artists have elevated to become a document of devotion.