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The New York Public Library Calendar of ExhibitionsHumanities and Social Sciences LibraryArt Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve -- September 12, 2008 - January 11, 2009 The Stadium: Daily News Photographs of the House That Ruth Built -- September 16, 2008 - October 26, 2008 Yaddo: Making American Culture -- October 24, 2008 - February 15, 2009 William James Bennett: Master of the Aquatint View -- November 7, 2008 - January 25, 2009 Afghanistan, or The Perils of Freedom: Photographs by Stephen Dupont -- November 7, 2008 - January 25, 2009 A Literary Christmas Miscellany from the Berg Collection -- December 5, 2008 - January 4, 2009 William Godwin's Juvenile Library -- February 13, 2009 - June 13, 2009 Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation -- April 3, 2009 - July 25, 2009 Jill Kupin Rose Gallery - Ongoing -- January 1, 1998 - Ongoing The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts"Take Me Out to the Ball Game": 100 Years of Music, Musicians, and the National Pastime -- July 11, 2008 - October 31, 2008 Focus on the '70s: The Fabulous Photography of Kenn Duncan -- July 30, 2008 - October 25, 2008 Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Outstanding Women Designers for Live Performance -- November 17, 2008 - May 2, 2009 Schomburg Center for Research in Black CultureAaron Douglas: African American Modernist -- September 11, 2008 - November 30, 2008 Science, Industry and Business LibraryReal Men and Women of Madison Avenue: Their Impact on American Culture -- June 24, 2008 - September 26, 2008 Not a Cough In A Carload: Images Used By Tobacco Companies To Hide the Hazards of Smoking -- October 7, 2008 - December 26, 2008 Hours, Tours, The Library Shops, and InformationHumanities and Social Sciences LibraryFifth Avenue and 42nd StreetArt Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve What is the reason for the enduring appeal of Art Deco design? The answer lies in the vitality of the decorative style’s visual elements. Art Deco captured the mood of 1920s and 1930s modernism, an age of jazz and streamlined machinery, with designs that are colorful, geometric, and filled with an intense rhythm. This exhibition seeks to give viewers a more intimate exposure to the style’s incredible energy by focusing on boldly graphic plate books, portfolios, and masterworks of the pochoir stencil print technique from the Library’s Art & Architecture Collection. Art Deco’s international flavor has played particularly well in New York, with many examples of landmark architecture and interiors throughout the city. The exhibition offers a reappraisal of the style’s most notable features and its often-overlooked legacy to modern art. Starting with key Art Nouveau designs that reveal the origins of the Art Deco impulse, the exhibition presents developing traits that move through the 1920s and into the next decade. Aspects of the style’s legacy can be seen in the first volume of the significant art journal Verve(1937-60), a review of art and literature that took root from the fertile soil of mature Art Deco, and in the innovative works of Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), an avant-garde painter and designer, whose brightly colored and geometrically-shaped creations demonstrate the union of fine art and commercial design aesthetics. The Stadium: Daily News Photographs of the House That Ruth Built Yankee Stadium—The Stadium—is arguably the most iconic sports venue in America, and as much a part of the New York landscape as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The 2008 baseball season turned sports spectators into witnesses of history as New Yorkers and Yankee fans the world over watched the last season-opener, the last All-Star game, the final pitch, and the last catch ever to take place in the House That Ruth Built. Yaddo: Making American Culture This exhibition explores the role of Yaddo, the artists‘ retreat, in fostering 20th-century American arts and letters. Founded in 1900 by financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina Trask, Yaddo began receiving guests in 1926 and was immediately hailed by The New York Times as a “new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts.” Since that inaugural season, Yaddo has navigated the roiled cultural and political life of 20th-century America while hosting thousands of artists and writers, including such luminaries as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Jacob Lawrence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Guston and Sylvia Plath. The exhibition is drawn from the intimate letters, papers, photographs, art objects, and ephemera that constitute the Yaddo Records, now in The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division; from collections throughout the Library; and from Yaddo’s own holdings of rare books and artworks. The story of Yaddo and the artists that it has fostered offers a window onto some of the most significant events of 20th-century history: the economic and social turmoil of the 1930s, the destruction and displacements of World War II, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the “race problem” from Jim Crow segregation through the Civil Rights movement, and the rise of the women’s and gay rights movements – all helped shape Yaddo, the lives of the artists who sought shelter there, and the works they produced. The exhibition explores the multiple ways that Yaddo as an institution, and the artists it supported, were ultimately anything but sequestered from the shifting social, political, and economic crises that marked the 20th century. The exhibition is accompanied by a collection of essays, edited by exhibition curator Micki McGee, published by Columbia University Press. William James Bennett: Master of the Aquatint View During the 1830s and early 1840s, William James Bennett (ca. 1784–1844) made a series of topographical prints that not only celebrated the beauty of the American landscape, but also recorded the young nation’s growing urban centers, with a special focus on New York. Bennett documented the bustling waterfront activity of thriving ports, bathing them in luminous light that unified water, ships, and architecture. Capturing the optimism of the new country, Bennett’s magnificent works—rendered in aquatint, a printmaking process that suggests the fluidity and transparency of watercolor—are regarded as the finest folio views of 19th-century American cities. The 40 prints and watercolors in this exhibition are drawn from the Print Collection of The New York Public Library, many from The Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, donated to the Library by I. N. Phelps Stokes in 1930. This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Afghanistan, or The Perils of Freedom: Photographs by Stephen Dupont Stephen Dupont is an award-winning photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, and war correspondent who is internationally recognized for his work in some of the world’s most dangerous areas, including Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zaire. This exhibition features selected photographs from his work in Afghanistan, where he has covered everything from civil war and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s to the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom and the ongoing war on terrorism. Also included are photographs from the series Axe Me Biggie, a phonetic rendering of the Dari for “Mister, take my picture.” Dupont made these portraits during the course of one day (March 13, 2006) with a Polaroid camera in a makeshift studio in the streets of Kabul. Together, these photographs tell a story of poverty, warfare, and broken promises, but also of perseverance and hope, as they refocus attention on the state of Afghanistan today. This exhibition, drawn from the Library's Photography Collection, is Dupont’s first solo show in the United States. Dupont was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1967. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair, among numerous other publications. He has earned many of photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo contest, Pictures of the Year International competition, the Australian Walkley Award, and the Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award. In 2007, he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanitarian Photography to continue Narcostan or The Perils of Freedom, a multimedia project documenting the effects of the rampant drug trafficking that has developed in Afghanistan since 2001. In April of 2008, he survived a suicide bombing while traveling with an opium poppy eradication team in Kabul. This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Stephen Dupont is represented by the Booklyn Artists Alliance. A Literary Christmas Miscellany from the Berg Collection Special Display: This holiday display features Charles Dickens’s prompt copy of A Christmas Carol, from which he gave his public readings; books with Christmas themes by T.S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson; Christmas greetings by James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, E.E. Cummings, and Maurice Sendak; and a Christmas letter from Jack Kerouac to his future wife, Stella Sampas. William Godwin's Juvenile Library William Godwin is often remembered as a supporting cast member in the lives of more famous British Romantic figures: as the husband of proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; as the father-in-law of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; or as the father of novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. During the political turmoil in England precipitated by the French Revolution, however, Godwin managed to make a name for himself as a great radical thinker with his Political Justice (1793), considered to be the first expression of modern anarchist philosophy. Godwin also wrote novels and plays, with varying levels of success, but his most popular works were the children’s books he wrote and published pseudonymously to avoid the stigma of his controversial reputation. The books he published through his Juvenile Library imprint, and sold in his bookshop of the same name, boldly exemplify his then highly contested belief that, rather than to moralize and teach practical facts, the goal of children’s literature should be to inspire the imagination. This exhibition, drawing primarily from the Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, uses a selection of illustrated children’s books, as well as prints, manuscripts, and realia, to introduce visitors to Godwin, his extraordinary family, and his Juvenile Library, in the context of the children’s book trade in early 19th-century London. Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation The defeat of France by Germany in May–June 1940 transformed the lives of French writers and publishers. Freedom of expression, almost achieved after centuries of struggle, was now set aside. Writers matter in France, and writers were deeply implicated in the changes of 1940. Some of their colleagues were silenced for racial or political reasons. How should they respond? Should they collaborate? Resist? Wait and see? Or follow some more complicated pathway through the changing course of the war? All of them risked being used by one side or another. Yet they were expected, in a nation that placed a high value on its intellectuals, to offer moral leadership in a time of doubt and uncertainty. Between Collaboration and Resistance begins with a look at the effects of World War I, the decline of the Third Republic, and the installation of the Vichy regime, followed by thematic sections examining everyday life, collaboration, resistance, the Holocaust, and international solidarities. It features often unique and largely unpublished contemporary documents concerning collaborators like Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Robert Brasillach; resistors like Louis Aragon, Jean Paulhan, and Robert Desnos; and writers who changed their minds like Paul Claudel. One of the exhibition’s most remarkable items is the manuscript of Irène Némirovsky's Suite française. Diaries, manuscripts, books, maps, letters, photographs, and other materials are drawn from the collections of The New York Public Library, the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, the Mémorial de Caen, and other institutions and private collections. This exhibition has been organized in partnership with the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine [IMEC] and the Bibliothèque nationale de Québec, with the cooperation of the Mémorial de Caen. Jill Kupin Rose Gallery - Ongoing  This ongoing exhibition consists of large wall panels with photographs, text, objects, and videos illustrating the history and the vast array of collections, services, and users of The New York Public Library's Branch and Research Libraries. The Jill Kupin Rose Gallery was created in 1998 by former New York Public Library Chairman Marshall Rose in memory of his late wife, Jill Kupin Rose. The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsDorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center40 Lincoln Center Plaza "Take Me Out to the Ball Game": 100 Years of Music, Musicians, and the National Pastime  An exhibition for the whole family! To celebrate the 100th anniversary of baseball theme songs, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presents a tribute to the sport and the musicians who love it, organized around the lyrics -- beginning with a history of the song and its creators. "Take me out with the crowd" focuses on composers who were fans and wrote about the game, among them Charles Ives and William Schuman. "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack" looks at baseball and promotion via vaudeville and the musical stage, as well as trading cards. "Root for the Home Team" features baseball musicians, among them Jane Jarvis, long-time organist for the New York Mets, and vocalists of the national anthem. The exhibition is based on New York Public Library collections, but includes unique items from the private collection of Andy Strasberg. Image: Sheet music for "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," as published in 1908. The featured performer is Nora Bayes. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Focus on the '70s: The Fabulous Photography of Kenn Duncan In the 1970s and early 1980s world of photography, Kenn Duncan was a name to be reckoned with. Duncan was a principal photographer for the entertainment magazine After Dark and for Dance Magazine, which chronicled the world of dance and choreography. Photographs by Kenn Duncan also appeared in Vogue,Harper’s Bazaar,Life,Time, and Newsweek. In addition, he photographed a dozen Broadway shows, including Hair, Applause, The Elephant Man, and Sophisticated Ladies, and published three volumes of his own photographs: Red Shoes, Nudes, and More Nudes. This retrospective of his 20-year career includes his iconic images of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Angela Lansbury, Rudolf Nureyev, Bette Midler, and the cast of Hair, as well as selections from his nudes and his work with hundreds of celebrities. Duncan’s complete archive was acquired by the Library in 2003 and is part of the Billy Rose Theatre Division. Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Outstanding Women Designers for Live Performance  A collaboration with the League of Professional Theatre Women, this exhibition features works by 110 distinguished designers of scenery, costumes, lighting, props, and projections from various performing arts disciplines, including dance, theater, and opera, from the 1890s to the present. Including photographs, sketches, drawings, set models, costumes, performance videos, ground plans, and interviews with designers, augmented by public programs and educational workshops, it focuses on women designers as participants in the major artistic movements of the period, from experimental theater through the development of modern and, later, postmodern, dance. The exhibition also illuminates women’s roles in developing new technologies and materials for performance: for example, women took the lead in the new field of lighting design, from turn-of-the-19th-century experiments to the computerization of cues in the 20th century. The exhibition also investigates the connections among women designers and women-run businesses. This exhibition is made possible in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Image: Photograph of lighting designer Jean Rosenthal by her frequent collaborator, choreographer Jerome Robbins. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture515 Malcolm X BoulevardAaron Douglas: African American Modernist Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) was considered the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. In paintings, murals, and book illustrations, he incorporated elements from music, dance, literature, and politics to produce powerful artistic forms that had a lasting impact on American art history and the nation’s cultural heritage. Working from a politicized concept of personal identity, he combined angular Cubist rhythms and seductive Art Deco dynamism with traditional African and African American imagery to develop a radically new visual vocabulary that evoked both current realities and hopes for a better future. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, curated by the Spencer Museum of Art/The University of Kansas, is the first nationally touring retrospective to celebrate his art and legacy. This special traveling exhibition features the four Douglas murals from the Schomburg Center’s Jean Blackwell Hutson General Research and Reference Division Reading Room. Science, Industry and Business Library188 Madison AvenueReal Men and Women of Madison Avenue: Their Impact on American Culture “Does She or Doesn’t She?” “Think Different.” “I Want My MTV.” “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands.” “Just Do It.” “Got Milk?” “Where’s the Beef?” These slogans are part of the American zeitgeist, but little is known about many of the people who created them—the culturally astute men and women who tapped so successfully into their generations’ desires and fears. This first-of-its-kind exhibition, presented by The One Club and The New York Public Library, shows that the people who created some of the most famous advertisements of the 20th century were as colorful as their slogans—from former spy David Ogilvy to scrappy street fighter George Lois, to tough, hardworking women such as Mary Wells Lawrence, Phyllis Robinson, and Shirley Polykoff, who held their own in the famously male world of 1950s and 1960s Mad Ave. The exhibition highlights the lives and work of dozens of brilliant copywriters and art directors who helped shape American consumption and culture over the past 80 years. The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue: Their Impact on American Culture features more than 200 advertisements, posters, books, TV commercials, and video and audio interviews that amount to a commercial history of 20th-century America. The majority of the men and women represented have been elected into The One Club’s Creative Hall of Fame. Not a Cough In A Carload: Images Used By Tobacco Companies To Hide the Hazards of Smoking Early in the last century, questions about the health effects of smoking became a topic of widespread discussion, as terms like “smoker’s cough” and “coffin nails” (referring to cigarettes) began to appear in the popular vernacular. Recognizing the need to counter this threat to their livelihood, tobacco companies undertook a multifaceted campaign to allay the public’s fears. One strategy was to promote smoking as a beneficial practice through endorsements by healthy and vigorous-appearing singers, Hollywood stars, elite athletes, and actors posing as medical professionals. This exhibition, created by Dr. Robert Jackler of the Stanford University Medical School, examines the advertising in which, between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often patently false claims in an effort to reassure the public of the safety of their products. Exhibition HoursHumanities and Social Sciences Library The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Science, Industry and Business Library ToursHumanities and Social Sciences Library: Building Tours 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m on Mondays to Saturdays; 2:00 p.m. on Sundays 12:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. on Tuesdays to Saturdays; 3:30 p.m on Sundays Unauthorized tours are not permitted. Please see our tours webpage for more information. Science, Industry and Business Library: A free one hour tour is offered Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 p.m. Meet at the Reception Desk on the Street Level. For information, call 212.592.7000. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: Free guided exhibition tours by appointment only. For information, call 212.491.2207. More information here. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: There are no tours offered at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the present time. 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