Brooklyn College Library Conservation Lab Opening

The Brooklyn College Library is happy to announce the opening of CUNY’s first conservation lab. This lab enables us to have a space for restoring and repairing valuable documents from the Library collection. The lab has been envisioned for several years and has now become a reality. Please join us for a brief ribbon cutting ceremony and a tour of the new space. We also invite you to view the accompanying exhibit highlighting the restoration work of Slava Polishchuk, including 17th century books, Ethiopian prayer books, and 20th century boxing ephemera.

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Annual Book Party

This event honors BC community authors who have authored/edited a book within the past year. The Library will add a copy of these books to our collection.

Thursday, May 7, 2009
12:30 - 2:00 PM

If you are planning to attend this event, please RSVP to jfinello@brooklyn.cuny.edu no later than Thursday, April 30.

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Postales Pintadas: A Visual Dialogue between the children of New York City and Santiago de Cuba – April 1 – May 15, 2009

By Katie Yamasaki

http://www.katieyamasaki.com/

Postales Pintadas is an exhibition of paintings inspired by a postcard exchange between Katie Yamasaki’s New York City public school students and their counterparts in Santiago de Cuba. Yamasaki asked her students in New York to create postcards for their peers in Cuba, describing themselves and the world they inhabit. She painted them in their world, combining their likeness with imagery from their own artwork, imaginations, and developing identities as she has come to know them in many years as their art teacher.

The exhibition Tarjetas Postales de Nueva York opened in Santiago de Cuba in the spring of 2007. Over 250 Cuban youth participated in the project. Many came to the gallery to choose the New York City kid with whom they most closely identified. The Cuban students created a response postcard describing themselves and what their lives are like in Cuba. Yamasaki, in turn, created corresponding paintings of the Cuban children, describing them and the world they inhabit.

The show is a visual dialogue in words and paintings. The words are the openhearted, unapologetic reflections of childhood, spoken with the clarity that children alone possess. The paintings are an attempt to illustrate childhood and adolescence from the voice of the child, catching the moment in life where identity, imagination and expression are at once hugely important and extremely fluid concepts. Finally, the images are the painter’s attempt to consider what it means for children to be free, and what each society’s role is in providing that freedom.

Opening Reception Thursday, April 2, 5-7 PM

Art Gallery
Brooklyn College Library
2900 Bedford Avenue
718-951-5335

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Graduate Student Focus Group – November 12, 2008

Graduate Students are invited to attend a focus group session to talk about library services. Since light refreshments will be served, an RSVP is required by November 5, 2008. Send RSVP to Graciela Canada (gcanada@brooklyn.cuny.edu) or call 718-951-2145.

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Topics for Discussion

Exhibit At The Brooklyn College Library, November 3 – December 18

Shirley Chisholm

"A Catalyst for Change"

Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Shirley Chisholm’s momentous election to Congress and her historic bid as the first African American and the first woman to seek the nomination of a major party for President of the United States.

The exhibit includes original documents, campaign buttons, bumper stickers, posters, photographs, letters, congressional and presidential position papers, signed letters and telegrams, convention delegate count sheets, signed copies of her two books, Unbought and UnBossed and The Good Fight, audio and video tapes of Chisholm campaigning and speaking, other election memorabilia as well as the Governor Pataki’s proclamation (with the pen he used to sign the bill) making November 30, Shirley Chisholm Day in New York City.

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Rev. William Augustus Jones: A Man of Words and Action, 1934-2006

The Reverend William A. Jones was the pastor of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church for forty-three years. He was a prominent national activist in numerous civil and human rights movements. Rev. Jones worked with famed leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and he succeeded Rev. Jackson as national chairman of Operation Breadbasket. Rev. Jones wrote several books, received numerous awards and honors, and was named by Ebony Magazine as one of the top fifteen black preachers in America (1984). His inspirational sermons were heard not only in Brooklyn but around the country and the world. The accompanying exhibit uses material drawn from his personal papers which were donated to the Library by the Jones family in the spring of 2007. These papers are now available for research.

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Stitch by Stitch: Works in Fabric

The Brooklyn College Library will have an exhibit of over 25 quilts made by members of the Quilters' Guild of Brooklyn. The exhibit will open on Tuesday, June 10, with a reception from 5 pm to 7 pm. There will also be a panel discussion on Tuesday, June 24, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm which will feature Guild members talking about their quilting journey. The exhibit will be on the first floor of the Brooklyn College Library from June 10 to August 22.

These works represent a new wave in the field of quilt making and textile art. The artists' approach to their medium range from traditional interpretations of tried and true quilt patterns to artists working in uncharted territory. The common thread that permeates throughout the exhibit is the joy of working with color, texture and fabrics. Each artist has a particular style and a unique message to communicate through their work.

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Library Exhibit May 27 through August

Lost Histories: New York's Underbelly 1860 – 1910 is an exhibit from the private collection of Richard Stremme. This exhibit can been see for the first time in the Archives and Special Collections exhibit cases on the first floor of the Library. Students in the Brooklyn College Academy completed the research for the exhibit.

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Finding Jefferson - The 1st Amendment in the Age of Terrorism

Alan Dershowitz is a Harvard Law Professor, an author, and an attorney whose career has been devoted to representing clients in criminal defense cases and civil liberty cases. He is also a Brooklyn College graduate (Class of 1959). His timely discussion will explore the line between dangerous speech and harmful conduct.

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Piano Concert

Marc Thorman, composer, pianist, and a leading scholar in the music of John Cage presents a program of original works for solo piano and recordings on May 1 at 2 PM in the Library's Woody Tanger Auditorium.

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GULAG - An Island in an Archipelago

This exhibit of Ivan Kovalev's photographs, personal letters, and artifacts takes you inside the Soviet network of Labor Camps which imprisoned millions of citizens. Unfortunately, this page of history is not yet closed.

Virtual Exhibit (or PDF)

Library Concert Series

Marc Thorman will present a program of original works for solo piano on November 27, 2007, at 2 p.m. in the Woody Tanger Auditorium of the Library. Dr. Thorman is a composer, pianist, and a leading scholar in the music of John Cage. He currently teaches music history and theory at the City University of New York. Admission is free for this event.

Library Guitar Series

The Library Guitar series kicks off its 5th season with acclaimed classical guitar virtuoso Pia Gazarek Offeremann. Her performance of Baroque and modern pieces will take place at 2 PM on October 30th in the Woody Tanger Auditorium. Admission is free. Pia was a 1994 prize winner at the International Competition for Classical Guitar in Krakow. She currently teaches in Berlin.

Coney Island Creek: The Future of the Past

The Brooklyn College Library will be hosting a reception and lecture featuring Charles Denson, the Executive Director of the Coney Island History Project. Both events will take place at the Brooklyn College Library on Thursday, October 18. The reception will be held at 6:00 p.m. in the Archives and Special Collections Reading Room on the first floor of the Brooklyn College Library. Mr. Denson will speak on the topic “Coney Island Creek: The Future of the Past” at 7:15 p.m. at the Brooklyn College Library Woody Tanger Auditorium. He will discuss historic and environmental aspects of the creek over the years. Members of the Brooklyn College community as well as the public at large are invited to both these events.

Mr. Denson is a writer, photographer and art director who began his career in 1973 as the staff photographer of New York Magazine. He has served as art director and designer of numerous publications including San Francisco Magazine, New West Magazine, Golden State Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1999 Denson was awarded the prestigious Chronicle Journalism Fellowship at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His first book “Coney Island: Lost and Found,” was named “New York Book of the Year” at the 2002 New York Society Library’s New York Book Awards.

There will be an accompanying exhibit of photographs and artifacts on view in the Library from October 18 through November 2, 2007.