An introductory tour of the Beinecke Library, its mission, history, architecture, collections, and services, led by a library staff or student guide. Tours last approximately 45 minutes. Reservations are not required. Note: see the library’s website (beinecke.library.yale.edu) for other important visitor information.

A reminder the Beinecke Library’s ground floor and mezzanine public exhibition areas are always free and open to the public, seven days a week. See the library’s website for more information on hours and exhibitions and to explore the library online.

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.

Join us for an introduction to preserving your own archives and to the digitization tools available in the New Haven Memory Lab. Jennifer Coggins, Beinecke Library’s Community Engagement Archivist, will cover basics of saving and sharing your personal archives and ways that digitization – creating digital copies – can be useful in the process.

Whitman on Walls! (WoW!) is a hybrid project juxtaposing film and live performance in response to New York poet Walt Whitman’s radical “Song of Myself.” Devised by Compagnia de’ Colombari Director Karin Coonrod in response to performance cancellations in 2020, Colombari’s original production of MORE OR LESS I AM, based on Whitman’s iconic poem, was transformed into seven short films featuring 50 performers from around the 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.