Event Calendar

In 2020, New-York Historical acquired the archive of Robert A. Caro, whose works on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson are regarded as masterpieces of modern biography and history. This ongoing exhibition presents never-before-seen highlights from the archive that document the sweeping history of New York and the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Mon – Thu CLOSED
Fri (Members & age 65+ & immunocompromised) 10am – 11am
Fri 11am – 8pm
Sat – Sun 11am – 5pm

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street)

New York, NY 

During the 1960s, paper dresses took the world by storm, when Scott Paper Company launched an ingenious marketing campaign—an early forerunner of viral marketing strategies—to promote “Dura-Weve,” the textile featured in their new disposable tableware line. With the idea that paper dresses were the future, other companies like Mars of Asheville joined the excitement and were soon selling 80,000 dresses per week.

Exhibition highlights include garments that mimicked kitchen countertop patterns, a promotional for Viking appliances; children’s dresses featuring Captain Kangaroo and Flintstones cartoons; a dress and matching placemats and napkins by Seagram’s 7, created so the ultimate party hostess could match her décor; and, mostly notably, the Campbell’s Souper Dress and the first two original Paper Caper dresses from Scott Paper Company. Altogether, Generation Paper examines how the whimsical and short-lived paper-dress trend of the 1960s was a period of experimentation that informs many modern textiles of today and will continue to influence the textiles of tomorrow.

Mon & Tue CLOSED
Wed 10am – 7pm
Thu – Sun 10am – 5pm

Ellman Fashion Design Gallery & Harnett Gallery
Phoenix Art Museum
1625 North Central Avenue

Phoenix, AZ

This exhibition presents excerpts from artist Peter Kuper’s forthcoming graphic novel, which he developed during his tenure as the Jean Strouse Fellow at The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2020–21. Kuper was inspired by his experiences exploring the Library while conducting research on the history of insects. He began his fellowship during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing him access to the building while it was closed to the general public. Finding himself virtually alone in the vast Beaux-Arts rooms and hallways of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, he began imagining arthropods occupying this unexpectedly and unprecedentedly vacant environment.

INterSECTS is an homage to the tiny, underappreciated creatures that touch everything people do and on which our very survival depends. The exhibition traces the evolution of insects over 400 million years and narrates their intersection with Homo sapiens right up to the present day—a story that will be expanded when the graphic novel is completed. Kuper also investigates the contributions of entomologists and other naturalists represented in the Library’s vast treasures—including Maria Sibylla Merian, Charles Henry Turner, and Vladimir Nabokov—who dedicated themselves to illuminating the value of insects in all their beauty and mystery.

Mon - Sat 10am – 6pm
Sun CLOSED

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Rayner Special Collections Wing
New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street

New York, NY

Brava! Women Make American Theater showcases, through archival materials, the ways in which women in the United States engaged in the production and reception of text-based stage performance over its long history. Far from offering a comprehensive account of women in theatrical enterprises, Brava! highlights how stage performance often mirrored, but also frequently challenged and changed, understandings of women’s roles and of women’s rights in larger U.S. society. Drawing principally on materials in the Yale Collection of American Literature and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, the exhibit explores how theater served as a site of women’s entry into public audiences for the arts in the 19th century, an entrée into the arts as professions in the 20th century, and a locus of calls for diversity in the arts in the 21st century.

Brava! captures intriguing moments of intersection between U.S. women’s and theater history: the sensation that was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, made so by women on the stage and in the audience; the leadership of early Black musical performers like the Hyers Sisters and Aida Overton Walker; the changing mores around female bodies conducted through the appearance of legs both on- and off-stage; and questions raised about gender identity itself both on- and off-stage. Women theater artists like Margaret Webster were persecuted equally with men by the Red Scare of the postwar period. They experimented with form, style, and venues for theatrical performance throughout the twentieth century. Numerous figures featured in the exhibit received and later led theater education in bourgeoning university programs, including Fanny McConnell at Iowa and Hallie Flanagan at Grinnell; Flanagan would eventually found the drama department at Vassar. Both Maurine Dallas Watkins and Theresa Helburn studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard before he became one of the founding faculty members of the Yale Drama Department; Shirley Graham studied at both Oberlin and Yale. These women participated in community theater organizations over generations, such as the early Provincetown Players, the Yiddish workers theater troupe Artef, and Negro People’s Theaters in New York and Chicago. It should come as no surprise, and yet needs to be said, that women were behind innovations in musical theater, choreography, experimental writing, design, acting, theater management, and more.

Mon & Tue 9am - 4:30pm
Wed 10am - 4:30pm
Thu & Fri 9am - 4:30pm
Sat & Sun noon - 4pm

Ground floor & mezzanine
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University
344 Winchester Avenue
Dock 8

New Haven, CT

James Joyce’s Ulysses, considered one of the most famous Irish novels and a significant work of modernist literature, was first published on February 2, 1922. This exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center, curated by Clare Hutton of Loughborough University, marks the 100th anniversary of the book's publication and investigates the important and largely unacknowledged role of women in realization of his famed masterpiece.

Objects from the Ransom Center’s James Joyce Collection tell the story of the formative role of his family members and, in particular, of four women—Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Sylvia Beach, who were associated with innovative literary experimentation of the period—all of whom helped Joyce’s novel gain widespread notoriety and success.

In the United States, Joyce’s novel was a source of controversy and the subject of an obscenity trial in 1921. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s serial publication of Ulysses in their American magazine The Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920 led to seizure of the edition by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. This led to legal proceedings and the obscenity conviction handed down before Joyce had even completed the work.

In the United Kingdom, Harriet Shaw Weaver committed to substantial, and initially anonymous, financial support of Joyce, and published excerpts of Ulysses in The Egoist. Within days of arriving to live in Paris in July 1920, Joyce had enlisted the help of yet another tireless female helper. Sylvia Beach played a pivotal role in bringing the full novel to print under the imprint of her bookshop and lending library Shakespeare and Company, and helped the novel reach a broad audience in print.

See more than 150 rare objects that tell this story, including a first edition of Ulysses, page proofs for its first printing, original copies of The Little Review, manuscripts in Joyce’s hand, rare books, printed ephemera, and photographs.

Free admission
 
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
300 West 21st Street

Austin, TX