There will be a joint opening reception for two new exhibitions at Beinecke Library: Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan and Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books.
Known primarily as a caricature artist, Thomas Patch (1725-1782) in fact engaged in a much wider array of activities. He was a landscape painter, experimental printmaker, and a dealer of antiquities and old master paintings. He was also among the first scholars of early Renaissance art. This exhibition will explore the many aspects of Patch’s art, life, and associations with the British community of diplomats, tourists, artists, and collectors in Italy.
Curated by Hugh Belsey, Independent Scholar
The Windham-Campbell Lecture is a central feature of the annual Windham-Campbell Prize Festival and is delivered each year by a distinguished writer on the topic “Why I Write.” This year, Ghanaian poet and writer Kwame Dawes shares insights into his craft and creative process. The annual lectures are published in extended form by Yale University Press in its Why I Write series.
Chirimen-bon, or crêpe-paper books, were a type of Japanese illustrated book produced between the 1880s and the 1950s and made with textured, fabric-like paper. They came into existence alongside textbooks for Japanese learners of Western languages, and often served as souvenirs for Western visitors to Japan. They covered a wide range of Japan-related topics—fairy tales, folklore, cultural traditions, holidays, festivals, performing arts, and scenes from everyday life—in English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and other languages.
Artists’ books are a creative medium in which the conventional materials and approaches of book production—for instance paper and ink, graphically compelling combinations of illustration and text, and structures that invite exploration—are deployed and sometimes subverted to create tangible, interactive, surprising works of art.
The plant kingdom has provided both the means of creating art and the impetus to do so for millennia. “Plants on Paper” reveals artists’ varied relationships with this more-than-human world, including Victorian works of nature printing and plant collecting, plant-based dyes and papers, and artists’ books looking closely at beneficial weeds, tenacious lichens, medicinal plants, and more. Together these works ask questions—about wildness and order, individualism and community, slowness and speed—and invite us to reflect on our place in plants’ green world.
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.
“SENSATION!” 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.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of “SENSATION! Reported Bodies in 19th-Century American Media”, on view in the Sterling Library Exhibition Corridor from April 28 to September 28, 2025. Curator Anne Gross ‘25 will provide a tour of this exciting exhibition and will be available for questions and conversation over light refreshments afterwards. No registration is necessary.
Yale’s Special Collections at the Beinecke house extraordinary Passover Haggadot, books of Jewish custom (minhagim), and legal treatises related to the holiday. Join us to explore these rare and beautiful books from around the world as the Passover season begins. At a pop-up exhibit, you are welcome to come at any time during the one-and-a-half-hour period to view the materials and ask questions.
