Currently at Carl A. Kroch Library
We host exhibitions in the Hirshland Exhibition Gallery, the Michael T. Sillerman ’68 Rotunda, and the reference room, which are all located in level 2B of Carl A. Kroch Library.
Hirshland Exhibition Gallery
Before social media, before #BlackTwitter, there was nineteenth-century Black print. “We struggle against opinions. Our warfare lies in the field of thought,” proclaimed the 1847 National Convention of Colored People held in Troy, NY.
Black Print draws on Cornell’s rich Africana Rare and Manuscript Collections to highlight the many ways Black Americans have used print and the press as spaces for artistic expression, communication and organizing, antislavery activism, humor, education, civil rights, and imagining new worlds. These items, ranging from poetry collections and autobiographies to novels and newspapers, showcase early African American literature and Black artistic expression, what Dorothy Porter described as the “beginnings of the Afro-American’s artistic consciousness.”
Black Print offers a snapshot of a robust community of writers thinking actively about Black life and Black art—the beautiful and the sublime, politics and popular culture—primarily through periodicals, pamphlets, and other ephemeral forms. Featured are works held in Cornell University Library’s Rare and Manuscript Collections by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sojourner Truth, and many more.
Recent Exhibitions
We also host many of our current and past exhibitions online, including those featured here. Please see Online Exhibitions for a complete list.
Online
No matter your age, you’ve likely encountered Dr. Joyce Brothers at some point in your life, whether you watched her television shows, listened to her advice on the radio, read her columns in Good Housekeeping, or spotted her in one of her innumerable cameo and game show appearances. Dr. Brothers was omnipresent in American media for over 50 years. A natural-born entertainer, she was first and foremost a mental health professional—often referred to as “the mother of media psychology”—who sought to do the most good for the largest number of people. The professional advice she offered to Americans in the comfort of their own living rooms helped normalize therapy and the public discussion of mental health, once deemed too private for broadcast television.
Dr. Brothers graduated from Cornell University in 1947 and began donating her material to the Cornell archives in 1987. What follows is a selection of materials highlighting the life and career of one of the most prolific professionals and celebrities of the last century.
Online
The seeds of our digital age were planted in the Rhode Island soil in 1793 when Samuel Slater and Moses Brown opened their first textile mill at Pawtucket Falls. The Industrial Revolution had already begun in England, and with designs stolen from Richard Arkwright, Slater would bring that revolution to an America that had just won its own.
Every textile tells a story about the people and places that made it.
Online
On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” The photographic images on the cover and throughout were central to its mandate to deliver sexual content for lesbians. The photography also created the greatest difficulties for the magazine’s circulation at a moment when many feminist leaders decried pornographic photographs and film as a form of violence against women. This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade. Made by staffers and freelancers, professionals and amateurs, members of the magazine’s inner circle and its far-flung readership, they convey the fantasies, imagination, humor, rigor, radicalism, political engagement, and ethos of community-building and inclusion that defined On Our Backs and made it a touchstone in the queer press. Additional photographs and documents elucidate the political and erotic contexts into which the magazine emerged, the women behind it, and their business practices and strategies. All materials are drawn from Cornell Library’s Human Sexuality Collection.