Browse Exhibitions

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.

In 1794 the dancing and Attitudes, or expressive postures, performed by Emma Hamilton (1761?-1815) were rendered in twelve neoclassical images engraved by Thomas Piroli after drawings by Frederick Rehberg. After the death of her husband Sir William Hamilton in 1803 and that of her lover Admiral Lord Nelson in 1805, Emma Hamilton and her Attitudes were the subject of a second, ‘enlarged’ edition of parodies by James Gillray in 1807 in which her person was dramatically inflated. Emma Hamilton Dancing displays these two editions beside each other for the first time.

Emma Hamilton Dancing presents these Attitudes among images of the tarantella, the waltz, minuet, cotillion, and quadrille as well as prints of ballet dancing in the age of the ballet d’action and works on the theory and practice of dancing. In this context, the Attitudes are seen moving within the world of dancing in ballrooms and onstage in Europe during the era of revolution in America, France and the Kingdom of Naples.

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.

Characterized by comically grotesque figures performing lewd and vulgar actions, bawdy humor provided a poignant vehicle to target a variety of political and social issues in eighteenth-century Britain. Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women explores the deployment of this humorous but derisive strategy toward the regulation of female behavior. The exhibition presents satirical images of women from a range of subject categories including the royal family, aging members of fashionable society, disparaged mothers, political activists, gamblers, medical wonders, artists, performers, and intellectuals.