Since 1996, the Library has created websites inspired by some of the physical exhibitions presented at its research centers, as well as a number of web-only presentations based on its collections.

Archived Exhibition Resources, A to Z

  • Nabokov Under Glass: A Centennial Exhibition

    Featuring materials from the Nabokov Archive in the Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, this online exhibition provides a chronological look at Vladimir Nabokov's life and literary output, starting with poems of his teenage years, through his latest novels and memoirs. The website, produced in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Nabokov's birth, provides insight into his powers of creation and his development as a writer.

  • Prints With/Out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s

    American artists in the mid 20th century were particularly intrigued by relief printmaking, whether woodcut, linocut, or experimental uses of plastic as a printing surface.

  • QA online exhibition 1

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  • Radioactive

    A companion website to the exhibition Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, which tells the story of Lauren Redniss, an artist, writer and former Cullman Center fellow, who drew on the vast collections of The New York Public Library to create a new work of art. The Library collaborated with a talented group of students at Parsons the New School for Design who, with Redniss as their guide, created an innovative website showcasing a dazzling array of new works inspired by the visual and narrative universe of Radioactive. 

  • Recent Acquisitions: New York Street Photography from the 1960s and 1970s

    This exhibition features the work of three New York photographers, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Joel Meyerowitz, who played a major role in the emergence of street photography as a central photographic practice in the 1960s. Following the lead of William Klein and Robert Frank, these photographers helped to transform documentary photography with their eccentric vision of the world. As the practice extended into the 1970s, street photography absorbed other artistic movements, as evidenced by the work of William Gedney, Roy Colmer, and Thomas Struth, whose photographs demonstrate both the continuity and diversity of photography in the streets of New York. The show is the first in a planned series of exhibitions that will showcase recently acquired New York City photographs from 1950 to the present.

  • Recent Acquisitions: Old Master Prints

    This exhibition will include 75 prints, acquired between 2000-2005, and will feature prints by Fontainebleu printmaker Pierre Milan, Jaques Callot, Jan van de Velde II, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo, Philibert-Louis Debucourt and Ferdinand Olivier, among others. In addition to comments on each artist/printmaker, the exhibit will address the kinds of issues, which are considered when acquiring a print for the collection, from context to condition.

  • Recollection: Thirty Years of Photography at The New York Public Library

    Henri Cartier-Bresson compared portraits to a visual reverberation, in which “the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit.” His definition of portraiture (appealing to themes of recall, repetition, and return) also applies more generally to photography itself, describing a medium that has been repeatedly renegotiated over its short history, whether in terms of mechanical reproduction, documentary evidence, or as an independent art. This online multimedia presentation celebrates thirty years of photogaphy at The New York Public Library.

  • Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825

    Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825 traces Russia’s movement from relative isolation to global empire through its contacts with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. When Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg as a “window on Europe” in 1703, he intended the city to symbolize Russia’s new direction. This website explored Russia’s exposure to and interaction with the larger world, as well as the significant role the new cosmopolitan capital played in this evolution.

  • Seeing is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration

    Illustrations were essential in spreading new scientific and medical ideas with clarity, dimension, and breadth that is not possible with text alone. Featuring illustrations from rare editions of works by such figures as Copernicus, Vesalius, and Curie, this online exhibition provides insight into why new developments in the sciences were often accompanied by corresponding developments in illustrative techniques.

  • Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet

    For the first time ever, selections from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript will be available for public viewing in the United States in this exciting exhibition, which is being shown in collaboration with the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England. This exhibition will highlight the literary and cultural legacy of P.B. and Mary Shelley, and that of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.