Exhibitions
The exhibition gallery is a public space within The Lewis Walpole Library that is open Wednesdays 2 to 4:30 pm when an exhibition is on view.
The Lewis Walpole Library usually develops and presents two to three exhibitions that draw from its collections each year, most with associated programming. In addition to the exhibitions on view at the Library in Farmington, the Library collaborates on and contributes to exhibitions held on Yale’s campus in New Haven and at other institutions.
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The Paradox of Pearls: Accessorizing Identities in the Eighteenth Century
Curated by Laura Engel, Professor, Duquesne University
On view September 27, 2024 through January 31, 2025
Pearls figure prominently in pictures of celebrated and imagined figures across the eighteenth century. Adorning royalty, celebrities, servants, and in fashion plates, the mysterious, opaque, and gleaming white accessory aligns with the mutable, seductive, and threatening emergence of new forms of identity. Worn as jewelry, as embellishments to the body and dress, or embedded in the settings of precious objects – pearls accessorize, highlight, colonize, and perform. As one of the most sought-after commodities of the early modern colonial enterprise, a precious jewel tied to bondage and violence, pearls have a baroque and complex history. Drawing from materials in the Lewis Walpole Library this exhibition will explore the “paradox of pearls” by considering how the varied and often contradictory meanings of this jewel appear in period images and the ways in which practices from the past connect us to the powerful presence of pearls today.
Associated programming:
Oct 10 Lecture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art: “Pearl Drops and Blackamoors: The Black Body and Pearlescent Adornment in European Art” with Adrienne L. Childs, Art Historian and Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Details and link to register.
Nov 16 LWL-Farmington Libraries Talk at the Lewis Walpole Library: “The Paradox of Pearls: Accessorizing Identities in the Eighteenth Century”with exhibition curator Laura Engel, Duquesne University. Details and link to register.