Browse Exhibitions

This web exhibit seeks to return us to the documents, photographs, artworks, and objects that have generated this tremendous response of scholarship, inquiry, and homage. Commemorating the 2017 exhibition at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the web exhibit brings together the original exhibit's narrative text with images of just shy of half that exhibit's objects. Those interested in seeing more are always welcome to visit the Beinecke; a complete checklist of the original exhibit is included in this web version.

Through print, speech, and sign, we use language to interact with the world around us. Language provides the labels for the social categories we use to describe the world. It’s beautiful, and it’s also systematic. Yet it's so ubiquitous we often take it for granted. This Model Research Collection makes language more visible by showing the different ways it contributes to the study of our lives: how language opens a window into the mind and brain; how children acquire language; how languages are lost and created around the world; and how language can be used, like archaeology with words, to study the past.

“Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain” explores the notion of empire’s “prospects”—its gaze upon bodies and landscapes, its speculations and desires, its endeavors to capitalize upon seized land and labor, as well as its failures to manage enslaved persons and unruly colonial ecologies. It reads latent anxieties in the policing of bodies and borders, both in the colonies and in the metropole, and examines the forces that empire mustered to curtail perceived threats to its regimes of power and knowledge. In addition to the focus on material from the long eighteenth century, the exhibition features a selection of four lithographs from Joscelyn Gardner’s series Creole Portraits III: “bringing down the flowers” (2009-11), a recent joint acquisition by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Gardner’s work mines the eighteenth-century Jamaica archive of white English immigrant, overseer, slaveowner, and pen-keeper Thomas Thistlewood, one of whose diaries is on loan from the Beinecke.

The portraits featured in this online exhibit are drawn from a larger series of photographs by Tanya Marcuse ’90 M.F.A. The project was commissioned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and displayed in the Memorabilia Room at Sterling Memorial Library in the Spring of 2020 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.”

Between 1770 and 1830, both fashionable dress and theatrical practice underwent dramatic changes in an attempt to become more “natural.” And yet this desire was widely recognized as paradoxical, since both fashion and the theater were longstanding tropes of artifice. In this exhibition, we examine this paradox of “artful nature” through the changing conception of theatricality during these decades, as mirrored and expressed in fashionable dress. Theater and performance practices in the late eighteenth-century, including the vogue for private theatricals, reinforced the blurred lines between the theater and everyday life. Classical sculpture became a reference point for women, as its artistic excellence was acclaimed precisely because it seemed so “natural.” But when actresses, dancers, painters, or just regular fashionistas posed themselves as classical statues come to life, they acted as both Pygmalion and Galatea, both the genius artist and the living artwork. “Artful Nature” refers simultaneously to the theatricality and deception typically attributed to fashionable women in the late eighteenth century, and at the same time to the potential survival strategies employed by women artists, authors, and actresses to craft their own parts.

Architecture at Yale University was born into the Yale School of the Fine Arts in 1879, but Yale did not have its first women graduates in architecture until the late 1940s. They have been few amongst their male peers and Yale leaders until recent years. This exhibition explores original contributions and experiences of some of the female pioneers of the Yale Architecture program; exhibited during the celebration of 50WomenAtYale150 commemorating the 50th anniversary of coeducation in Yale College and the 150th anniversary of women students at the university.

Books are the lawyer's tools and the law student's laboratory, and nothing brings this home better than the marks that they leave in their books. Over 30 such annotated and inscribed books from the Lillian Goldman Law Library have been selected, offering both research potential and insights into the roles that law books have played in people's lives. The marks left by readers document the lived experience of the law, and remind us that law is above all a human endeavor.

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is best known today for her fiction, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Age of Innocence” (1920). Yet she also had a keen interest in architecture and interior design. Her first full-length publication was an interior design treatise titled “The Decoration of Houses” (1897) and she directed the design of many of her homes throughout her life. This exhibition brings together both aspects of Wharton’s career. It explores the rules she defined in “The Decoration of Houses” and their application in her own homes, alongside her attention to design details in the handwritten manuscript of “The Age of Innocence,” and focuses on Wharton’s treatment of the drawing room, which provides a particularly rich context for understanding Wharton’s elite New York City society at the turn of the twentieth century and the role of women within it.

Women have been active participants throughout the history of Yale Divinity School. They first made vital contributions to YDS as the wives of faculty and students, and then later as faculty, staff, students, and mentors themselves. This exhibit celebrates the personal accomplishments and contributions of the women of YDS to the life and legacy of the school.

The creation of the Women in Science and Engineering 2020 Edition exhibit was inspired by Yale University’s celebration of 50 years of undergraduate coeducation and the 150th year anniversary of female graduate students at Yale. We hope to raise spirits and encourage STEM students with the profiles of historical and current women figures who have persevered in their endeavors. Featured is Brenda Zlamany’s commissioned painting, Portrait of Yale’s First Seven Women PhDs.