Digital Exhibitions

Links below to online exhibitions from Beinecke Library collections. Also make sure to explore the more than one million images in the Beinecke Digital Library and visit more Yale Library online exhibits here.

  • Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and The Beinecke Library

    In an era that made Bessie Smith and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson household names, taught the world to Charleston, and introduced America’s favorite poet, Langston Hughes, Black American cultural and intellectual endeavor surged into the American mainstream. Hughes himself described the period most aptly, just after it ended, as the time “when the Negro was in vogue.”  Called a “movement” or “renaissance” by many of its own participants, and now most commonly remembered as the Harlem Renaissance, the period from about 1917 to about 1939 saw unprecedented achievements in Black American publication, performance, and visual arts. In the century since, this period has captured the American popular imagination with its style, music, and dance.

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  • 12 Portraits: Studies of Women at Yale

    The portraits featured in this exhibit are drawn from a larger series of photographs by Tanya Marcuse (MFA ‘90). The project was commissioned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in honor of the university-wide 50 Women at Yale 150 celebration, which aims “to showcase the depth of women’s contributions to Yale and to the world, to celebrate women at the university, and to inspire thoughtful conversation about the future of women at Yale and in the larger society.”

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  • Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800

    Was the pen ever mightier than the sword?  This exhibition looks closely at the hand-written text in early modern Britain, and asks what it has to tell us about power, wit, and the questions we should ask of the manuscript past. Read and download the exhibition brochure PDF and see 20 videos of exhibition highlights.

     
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  • Carl Van Vechten’s Harlem Renaissance Portraits at Beinecke Library

    The portraits in this online exhibition were exhibited in 2017 at Beinecke Library in Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and The Beinecke Library and are from prints in the Carl Van Vechten Papers at the Beinecke Library.

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  • Not Reading in Early Modern England

    Drawing on the early modern and Osborn collections at the Beinecke Library, this exhibit showcases three genres of early modern study aids: the commonplace book, the epitome, and the index. 

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  • Making the Medieval English Manuscript: The Takamiya Collection at the Beinecke Library

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  • Arthur W. Wang: Photographs

    An online exhibition celebrating the portraits taken by the distinguished book editor, Arthur W. Wang.

    Date created: July 2002

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  • Go, Little Book: Portable Medieval Manuscripts from the Beinecke Library

    Three portable medieval manuscripts, in celebration of the Medieval Academy of America’s meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, March 18-20, 2010

    Date created: March 2010

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  • Imprints: David Plowden, a Retrospective

    An online exhibition of the photographer David Plowden who has documented vanishing landscapes and artifacts, forming an image of life in 20th century urban and rural America.

    Date created: September 1997

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  • No Place on Earth: America and the Utopian Dream

    An introduction to American utopias—from the first Puritan settlements to the communes of the 1960s—through literary works and manuscript collections in the Beinecke Library.

    Date created: 2006

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  • Petals on a Wet Black Bough: American Modernist Writers and the Orient

    An online exhibition exploring the influence of the Far East on American Modernist writers. The exhibition details the experiences of writers including Ezra Pound, H.D., Wallace Stevens, Williams Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Thornton Wilder and others. 

    Date created: October 1996

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  • The Bollingen Prize for American Poetry

    An exhibition devoted to the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, a prestigious literary honor bestowed on a poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.

    Updated biennially with each award recipient

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  • The Illustrated Word

    An online exhibition curated by Yale University undergraduate students in the Spring 2006 course “Print Culture at the Fin de Siècle.”

    Date created: 2006

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  • The Illustrating Traveler

    An online exhibition displaying illustrated traveler’s narratives and original art by travelers from the later 18th to the late 19th century.

    Date created: September 1996

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  • The Speculum Theologiae

    A collaborative project created by the undergraduate students in Brian Noell’s seminar “The Medieval World of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.” The Speculum Theologiae explores the Beinecke Library’s manuscript MS 416, a late thirteenth-century or early fourteenth-century collection of mnemonic devices from the Cistercian abbey of Kamp in western Germany.

    Date created: Spring 2006

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