Past Exhibitions
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Entrance Case
- January 6 - March 31 2022: Garages & Gadgets: Selections from the Silicon Valley Archives
- March 31 - June 30 2022: Designing Radically Inclusive Solutions
- August 14 - December 15, 2022: South Asia: 75 Years of Partition-Independence - The summer of 2022 marked 75 years since the modern nation states of India and Pakistan were born. With hastily drawn boundaries the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into a Muslim-majority East and West Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India. The Partition of 1947 displaced more than 15 million people with other 2.5 million missing or persumed dead. This exhibit commemorated Indian and Pakistani independence from colonial rule and the bloody legacy of Partition.
- January 9 - March 24, 2023: Cars & Climbing: Systems for Quantifying Performance - Throughout history, enthusiasts have developed methods to describe and rate performance systematically. Based on archival collections at Stanford, this exhibit explored the genesis of these systems as means for quantifying experiences like the difficulty of a rock climbing route or the quality of the ride that an automobile provides.
- April 10 - June 23, 2023: Accessible/Assistive: Addressing Barriers to Information with Technology - Accessible technology is designed to be inclusive of the needs of all users; assistive technology is created to enhance the daily lives of people with specific disabilities. Both types of technology are vital to a library's ability to address barriers to information for its patrons. This exhibit provided an overview of past and present forms of accessible and assistive technology used on Stanford's campus.
- July 19 - September 14, 2023: The Poisonous Green Book of the Victorian Era - During the Victorian Era, the toxic compound copper acetoarsenite was frequently used to create a bright green binding color. Inspired by the Winterthur Poison Books project, this exhibit examines the context and history behind copper acetoarsenite and the field of chemistry during this period, as well as the rise of workplace safety regulations. It explores the available testing methods for identifying this toxic compound and gives practical tips and advice for safe handling of books and materials.
- September 25 - December 15, 2023: Women in Science, Technology, & Medicine: The Early Years at Stanford & Beyond - This exhibition is an extension of the Department of Special Collections’ exhibition currently on view in the Peterson Gallery & Munger Rotunda through March 24, 2024. Embodied Knowledge: Women and Science before Silicon Valley explores the long history of women pursuing scientific, medical, and technical knowledge from the Middle Ages through the mid-twentieth century. It showcases Stanford’s considerable holdings for this subject, including the role of our own university in this history. We invite viewers to see them as building blocks in a global history of gender and knowledge. The exhibition was curated by Stanford History Professor Paula Findlen with contributions from a diverse group of faculty, curators, and graduate students across the institution. Deardra Fuzzell managed the production and installation of the exhibition assisted by Elizabeth Fischbach (retired). The Hohbach Hall extension was made possible by the assistance and expertise of Silicon Valley Archives team members Kristen Valenti, Spencer Gondorf, and Charu Jain.
- January 9 - March 22, 2024: Undergraduate Showcase: Stanford Storytellers - In anticipation of Stanford’s new Capstone requirement, the Libraries is pleased to kick off a series of exhibits showcasing significant undergraduate works of research and creativity. This first exhibit features books that were authored and designed by Stanford students, including works from the Stanford Graphic Novel Project and children’s books created by students in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR).
- April 2 - June 21, 2024: Stanford's Rainbow Coalition - In 1987, the Asian American Student Association, Black Student Union, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), and the Stanford American Indian Association united to form the Rainbow Coalition and drafted a “Rainbow Agenda,” a set of demands that highlighting the shared needs of these communities, including increased recruitment of students and faculty of color, improved curriculum and ethnic studies, a permanent ban on grapes, and a renewed commitment to discourage Indian mascot fanatics. Rainbow Coalition actions included protests against the ethnocentric Western Culture requirement in 1988, and the takeover of the President’s Office in 1989.
- September 20 - October 18, 2024: Yes I Am: The Richard Weiland Story - Richard “Ric” Weiland, joined his former high school classmates Bill Gates and Paul Aller at Microsoft after graduating Stanford in 1976. In 1988, he left the company at the age of 35 to pursue full-time philanthropy. Drawing on the Richard William Weiland papers, 1969-2009, this exhibition showcases Ric’s story through his work, his activism for the LGBTQIA+ movement (particularly in the Seattle area), and his extensive philanthropy, as well as his personal life.
- October 24, 2024 - February 14, 2025: From Matzo Balls to Metrics - “Jewish food” means many things–from matzo ball soup to overstuffed deli sandwiches. Through another lens “Jewish food” is defined by prohibition–no pork, shellfish, or mixing meat and dairy. This exhibit celebrates Jewish food through the hundreds of community Jewish community cookbooks collected by Stanford Libraries, combining images personal accounts with quantitative analysis of these recipes as a data set. How can we understand “Jewish food” better through seeing what these recipes share and how they diverge?
Main Exhibit Promenade
- January 6 - March 31 2022: Garages & Gadgets: Selections from the Silicon Valley Archives
- September 6 - December 15, 2022: Paper Trails: The Art of Processing Archival Collections - Every archival collection that Stanford Libraries acquires must be processed before it can be made available for research. The expertise, thought, and care that goes into processing archival collections often occurs behind-the-scenes. Using the John Perry Barlow papers as a through-line, this exhibit explored the art of processing archival collections.
- January 9 - March 24, 2023: From NEAR to Far: a View of a Cold War-era Aerospace Engineer & His Company - Jack Nielsen was Chief Scientist at NASA Ames, and founder of Vidya Inc., before founding Nielsen Engineering and Research. NEAR today is a division of AMA Inc., but the legacy of Nielsen lives on, as shown in this exhibit. This collection is a rare look inside Cold War aerospace and weapons technology, as well as technical report literature from governments and companies.
- April 10 - June 23 2023: Unexpected Technology - Drawing from archival collections across Stanford, this exhibit explored the unexpected, overlooked, and surprising results of the multi-dimensional relationships between technology and culture. Two simple concepts informed this exploration. First, technology is everywhere. Second, "technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral" (Mel Kranzberg).
- July 19 - December 15, 2023: Encoding: Computers as a Global Medium - Drawing from the Libraries' extensive collections, Encoding illustrates two fundamental shifts in the history of computing: recasting computers as a communications medium rather than solely as a means for calculation by "number crunching" and developing encoding systems that encompassed more of the world's text and language systems. The result was global computing: a technology that today encompasses virtually all the world's cultural, financial, educational, and entertainment media. Notable collections include the Unicode Collection, the Louis Rosenblum Papers, and the Thomas S. Mullaney East Asian Information Technology History Collection.
- January 9 - June 21, 2024: The Apes & Us: A Century of Representations of Our Closest Relatives - Centering upon a set of paintings by the Austrian artist and evolutionist Gabriel von max (1840-1915), The Apes & Us explores a century of representations of primates in relation to humans. Come tour the cultural fascination with apes that began in the decades after Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859) as it spread into art, literature, and film, science, and pseudoscience, the scholarly and the sensational.
- October 5, 2024 - March 4, 2025: To Trust or Not to Trust: Authenticity by Design - The internet is at an inflection point. With the growth of mis/ disinformation, artificial intelligence and synthetic media, trust in information faces unprecedented threats. Authenticity is not guaranteed. At the same time, new technologies–referred to as “Web 3”–present opportunities to protect the integrity of data. These solutions can be applied to critical practices including investigative journalism, historical archiving, and the admissibility of legal evidence. This exhibit, curated by the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, asks: How might we design information systems for authenticity?