Browse Exhibitions

The form of the news has become a national obsession. Is journalistic objectivity obsolete? Has national discourse fragmented into self-reinforcing echo chambers? Is fake news the problem, or are conspiracy theorists to blame? These questions are important, but they are ultimately symptomatic of a deeper issue: a universal dissatisfaction with the way the news relates its readers to the world. Reading the news, we feel despair or impotence about current events. We feel overwhelmed or paralyzed. We feel agony or numbing unreality. These urgent feelings make us forget that, though the news represents the world, it also constructs the world. “SENSATION! Reported Bodies in 19th Century American Media” is an exhibit that reads the news for its literary and artistic features. How does the news create what we know about the world? How does the news determine how we feel about those events that unfold beyond our immediate sense perceptions? How does the news relate our bodies to the world it represents?

The Anthropocene describes a new geological epoch marked by the significant global impact of human activity on the Earth's systems. During the proposed advent of the Anthropocene in the 19th/20th century, artist Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) challenges the prevailing conception of the Anthropocene as a human-centered (anthropo) age (cene), seeking a balance between the catalytic forces of humans and nature that preserves the agency of the ecological world.

Martin Johnson Heade and the Anthropocene parses the artist's visual and written reflections in the context of the biocentric Anthropocene, offering one of many perspectives that develops our understanding of the origin and trajectory of the epoch.

Shining Light on Truth: Early Black Students at Yale is a research tool dedicated to understanding and uplifting early Black pathfinders at the university. The site includes profiles of every Black student, identified to date, who studied at Yale before 1940. In addition to information about their Yale attendance, profiles include demographic information, publications, and narrative biographies. The site–part of an ongoing, comprehensive effort to identify Black students in Yale’s history–will be continually updated with new information.

Pearls figure prominently in pictures of celebrated and imagined figures across the eighteenth century. Adorning royalty, celebrities, servants, and in fashion plates, the mysterious, opaque, and gleaming white accessory aligns with the mutable, seductive, and threatening emergence of new forms of identity. Worn as jewelry, as embellishments to the body and dress, or embedded in the settings of precious objects – pearls accessorize, highlight, colonize, and perform. As one of the most sought-after commodities of the early modern colonial enterprise, a precious jewel tied to bondage and violence, pearls have a baroque and complex history. Drawing from materials in the Lewis Walpole Library this exhibition will explore the “paradox of pearls” by considering how the varied and often contradictory meanings of this jewel appear in period images and the ways in which practices from the past connect us to the powerful presence of pearls today.

This exhibit highlights early LGBTQ+ student organizing at YDS and LGBTQ+ student organizing at YDS today.

“Anne Boleyn: Life and Legend” explores the story of Anne Boleyn (1501 or 1507?–1536), one that has captured audiences for 500 years. Anne Boleyn, second wife to Henry VIII (1491–1547), is often remembered as the instigator of English Reformation and thus the Church of England, mother to the legendary Elizabeth I (1533–1603), and of course, the first wife that Henry VIII beheaded. This exhibition hopes to center Anne in her own narrative and to explore the relationship between gender and power in the Tudor era. The first part of the exhibit explores her life and world, while the second half traces Anne’s legacy in popular memory.

This exhibit features objects representing OHAM's early years such as recording media over time, carbon copies of typed transcripts with corrections in Aaron Copland's hand, and the Ives LP boxed set.

The work highlights the complexity of ties to slavery among the early leaders of the Medical Institution of Yale College and the pervasive use of anecdote and pseudoscience at Yale and other medical schools of the 19th century to attribute biological differences to race.