The exhibition Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City features the work of five contemporary New York–based photographers drawn primarily from new acquisitions in the Photography Collection. Thomas Holton’s The Lams of Ludlow Street is an empathetic account of one family’s daily life in Chinatown and a photographer’s personal quest to better understand his own heritage. Bettina Johae’s borough edges,nyc is a digital project exploring the edges of the city's five boroughs, which the photographer physically traversed as a way of “remapping” the supposedly well-known city. In Window, Reiner Leist used a 19th-century camera to photograph the view from his 26th-floor apartment on Eighth Avenue overlooking downtown Manhattan. At different times on almost every day during the past decade, Leist captured a slice of Manhattan that includes One Penn Plaza, Madison Square Garden, and, until September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center towers. Over the same period of time, Zoe Leonard tracked changes and disappearances occurring on the Lower East Side as a result of the city’s economic transformation; her Analogue also serves as both elegy and homage to a long-standing tradition of documentary photography. In his series Untitled/This is just to say, Ethan Levitas photographs individual train cars and their passengers along the elevated lines of the New York City subway, capturing unexpected moments of connection and contradiction in the most obvious and overlooked of public spaces. Levitas’s project, like all of the works in Eminent Domain, deals with the life of the city in terms of passage (of seasons and time, people and place) and exchange (between individual and collective, interior and exterior). Turning on the nature of photography itself (which always complicates the relationship between private and public property), the works in the exhibition intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City. A publication accompanying the exhibition will include written meditations on these themes by the Bronx-born artist Glenn Ligon, who is known for his multi-media explorations of critical issues in contemporary culture.


Acquisition of works for this exhibition was made possible through the Estate of Leroy A. Moses, which provided funds to purchase photographs that enhance the Library’s collection of New York City views from 1950 to the present day.


Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc., and by an anonymous contribution in honor of Elizabeth Rohatyn.

Additional support has been provided by The L Magazine, the exhibition's Media Sponsor.

Support for The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program has been provided by Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz I. and Adam Bartos, Jonathan Altman, and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

Emblazoned high above the threshold, the expression “life beyond life” taken from John Milton’s stirring defense of free speech, aptly ushers visitors into the Rose Main Reading Room of The New York Public Library. With a reputation rivaling that of the work of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the poetry of John Milton (1608–1674) was avidly collected by the Library's founding fathers, Samuel J. Tilden and James Lenox. This Wachenheim Gallery exhibition fittingly celebrates the quadricentennial of Milton’s birth by giving as much emphasis to his masterworks as to revealing the different ways his poetry has been appreciated by admirers and critics. The first part of the exhibition consists of three sections introducing visitors to Milton’s life, work, and those influences most affecting his development; the exhibition’s second part is divided into three historical sections, showing visitors how in each century, Milton’s readers brought their own concerns, values, and biases to his poetry.

Special Display: The first substantial printed book in the West is the royal-folio two-volume Bible on display, comprising nearly 1,300 pages and printed in Mainz on the central Rhine by Johann Gutenberg (ca. 1390s–1468) in the 1450s. Probably completed between March and November 1455, when Gutenberg’s bankruptcy deprived him of his printing establishment, the Bible epitomizes Gutenberg’s triumph, arguably the greatest achievement of the second millennium. Over possibly twenty or more years, at Mainz and perhaps at Strasbourg, he succeeded in developing printing from movable type in the West.

Perhaps some 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible were originally produced, including about 45 on vellum. Of these, 48 integral copies survive, including eleven on vellum. The Lenox copy on display, printed on paper, is the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the United States, in 1847. Its arrival is the stuff of romantic national folklore. James Lenox’s European agent issued instructions for New York that the officers at the Customs House were to remove their hats on seeing it: the privilege of viewing a Gutenberg Bible is vouchsafed to few.

The REAL Winnie-the-Pooh won't be found on a video, in a movie, on a T-shirt or a lunchbox. Since 1987, the REAL Pooh and four of his best friends--Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger--have been living at The New York Public Library.

Long before Walt Disney turned Pooh and his pals into movie stars, Christopher Robin Milne, a very real little boy living in England, received a small stuffed bear on his first birthday. He named him Edward Bear (later renamed Winnie-the-Pooh). Following Edward came the rest of the stuffed animals, which Christopher loved and played with throughout his childhood.

One day, Christopher's father, A.A. Milne, and an artist named Ernest H. Shepard, decided that these animals, and two other imaginary friends, Owl and Rabbit, would make fine characters in a bedtime story. From that day on, Pooh and his friends have had many fanciful adventures, from Piglet's encounter with a Heffalump to Eeyore's loss of his tail. These stories have been embraced by millions of children and adult readers for more than 70 years.

Anyone can visit the real Winnie-the-Pooh and his pals. Every year thousands of children and their parents have come to see them. They have recently moved from their previous home in the Central Children's Room to grand new quarters in the History and Social Science Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Pooh and his friends are as happy as when they lived in the 100 Acre Wood.

Edouard Baldus came to Paris from Prussia in 1838 to pursue painting, at which he had only very modest success. By 1849 he had turned his attentions to photography, a still-experimental medium that had been introduced only a decade earlier. Baldus was one of five photographers selected by the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1851 to make surveys of historic sites around France. These Missions Héliographiques, as they were called, were intended to help the Commission determine the preservation and restoration needs at the sites, many of which had never been seen by the Commissioners. Baldus’s itinerary took him south and east where he photographed the Palace of Fontainebleau, Roman monuments and ruins and medieval churches in Provence, Arles, and the Rhône Valley. These photographs won him additional government support, and in the following years he photographed the major monuments of Paris, returned to the southern countryside, and in 1855 documented the construction of the New Louvre. This exhibition presents rare Edouard Baldus photographs from this period.

Cliché-verre is a technique that combines aspects of printmaking and photography. Developed around 1839, this process begins with a glass plate on which an artist either paints a design or scratches a design on a prepared ground. The glass plate is then treated as a negative and placed on top of light-sensitive paper and exposed to the sun. Artists of the Barbizon school were the first, and most prolific, experimenters with this technique. These artists, who lived and worked near the forest of Fontainebleau, celebrated the natural world. They turned away from both classical and romantic treatments of landscape and chose to depict humble scenes based on their direct observations of nature. This exhibition draws from the extraordinary holdings of French 19th-century prints in the Samuel Putnam Avery Collection and features cliché-verre landscapes by Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, and Jean François Millet.

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 exhibition traces the evolution of the church from its founding in Lower Manhattan in 1808 as the first African-American Baptist Church in the state of New York through its current work as an agent for positive social change in the Harlem community and the city of New York.

For Broadway's lyricists, composers, and orchestrators, the Tony Awards represent the highest honor that their colleagues can bestow. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts delves into its peerless collections for this multi-media tribute to the creators of the Best Musicals, as well as winners of the occasional Best Score Tony. Working backwards from the award ceremony, the exhibition reveals the work of putting on a show -- from the opening night performance back through rehearsals, orchestrations and arrangements, demos and money raising, writing the songs, and plotting out the show to the original concept. Material is drawn from the archives of songwriters and their producer, designer, director, and performer colleagues in the Library’s four research divisions, including, among many others, Richard Rodgers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Frank Loesser, Harold Prince, Michael Stewart, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Fred Ebb, Charles Small, Edward Kleban, and the New York Shakespeare Festival.

A Saint in the City--originally on view at Fowler Museum at UCLA--presents the visual culture of a dynamic religious movement known as the Mouride way that is inspired by a Senegalese Sufi pacifist, poet, and saint named Amadou Bamba (1853-1927). The Schomburg Center will feature selections from the original exhibition.

A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegalwas organized and produced by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and curated by Dr. Mary Nooter Roberts and Dr. Allen F. Roberts in collaboration with Senegalese National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities. Additional support was provided by the UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center.

The current exhibition of A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has been made possible thanks to several institutions at Columbia University: The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life; the Institute of African Studies; the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and the Committee on Global Thought.

The most celebrated American choreographer of his time, Jerome Robbins belongs uniquely to New York. He was born in the city and died there, and his dances, both for Broadway and for the ballet stage, recounted its lore and the joys and travails of its ordinary folk. His dances touched a contemporary chord. They conveyed vernacular energies and communal pleasures, echoed the rhythms of jazz, and were set physically and psychologically in New York landscapes. New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World explores Robbins's work in the context of the many, overlapping New York worlds that met in it. The exhibition draws principally on the very rich collections of Robbins material at the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division, as well as on material from other Library divisions, augmented by loans from the Museum of the City of New York, the Paley Center for Media, The Jerome Robbins Trust and Foundation, and private individuals. The exhibit has been curated by Lynn Garafola, professor of Dance at Barnard College.

This adventurous theater for children has been, from their earliest performances at The Living Theater in the sixties through their tours of the Middle East, Asia and the British Isles, to their current performances in New York City and across the United States, profoundly influential artistically and managerially—and has performed for more then five million children! Under the artistic direction of Judith Martin, the company creates a distinctly contemporary theater. Their shows vividly reflect the everyday lives of children. Their performance style is direct, humorous and friendly. Their sets, props and costumes made of brown paper bags, cardboard boxes and household objects. Their shows are a memorable, personal experience for their young audiences. The artistic endeavors of the company have been strongly supported by a dedicated administration. Under the guidance of Managing Director, Judith Liss, The Paper Bag Players have achieved a series of “firsts.” The Paper Bag Players were the first theatre for children to receive a grant from The National Endowment for Arts, to receive an OBIE, to perform at Lincoln Center and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This exhibit of photos, posters, historic documents, costumes and props, many drawn from the Paper Bag Players Archives, newly acquired by the Billy rose Theatre Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It celebrates the 50th Anniversary of The Paper Bag Players. One of the longest running theaters for children in America, they are still as new, lively and imaginative as the youngest member of their audience.

"Gouaches" is an exhibition of four paintings on paper by the well-known painter Judith Linhares. These vivid and expressive images rendered in lush and brilliant colors depict simple subjects in a magical way. Ms. Linhares free handling of form and content is evident through her sophisticated rendition of space and color. Tom Huhn, the art critic and the Head of the Art History Department at the School of Visual Arts, will join Ms. Linhares for an "Artist Dialogue" on Monday May 19th at 6:30 p.m. on the 6th floor.