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Yaddo Archive Exhibit |
 Yaddo 1933: Philip Reisman, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, unidentified girl, Penina Kishore. |
New York, NY (July 22, 2008) – "Yaddo: Making American Culture", an exhibition exploring Yaddo's role in some of the most significant events of the last 100 years, will open at Gottesman Hall in The New York Public Library's Fifth Avenue Humanities and Social Sciences Library on October 24, 2008.
The exhibition, which will remain on display until February 15, 2009, will explore the multiple ways that Yaddo as an institution, and the artists it supported, were ultimately anything but sequestered from the shifting social, political, and economic crises that marked the twentieth century. The displayed materials will draw from institutional records of The Corporation of Yaddo that were acquired by the NYPL in 1999 through a gift of the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund, from collections throughout the NYPL, loans from major collections and museums, and from Yaddo's own holdings.
 Yaddo group on Lake George boat landing in 1937: Unidentified man, Elizabeth Ames, Ames's dog Brownie, John Cheever, unidentified man and woman. (Writer John Cheever served as Yaddo's boatman, ferrying artist guests to Yaddo's Triuna camp on Lake George.) |
"Yaddo: Making American Culture" will explore how the century-old artists' retreat created a community out of some of the nation's most distinguished writers, composers, performers and visual artists, and so helped to forge a distinctive American tradition in the arts. The story of Yaddo and the artists it has fostered offers a window into history. The economic and social turmoil of the 1930s, the destruction and displacements of the Second World War, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the "race problem" from Jim Crow segregation through the Civil Rights movement, and the rise of the women's and gay rights movements are among the events that shaped Yaddo, the lives of the artists who sought shelter at Yaddo, and the works those artists produced.
Through a rich multimedia installation of letters, papers, photographs, books, artworks, film clips and sound recordings, the exhibition will reveal how Yaddo brought together such luminaries as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Philip Guston, Jacob Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor and Sylvia Plath, nurturing their creative work while fostering a multitude of friendships, rivalries, collaborations and cross-influences. When the retreat welcomed its first guests in 1926, The New York Times hailed Yaddo as a "new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts."
Because of the far-ranging influence of that experiment, the exhibition will offer an intimate yet panoramic view of American culture from the 1920s through the 1980s and a rare glimpse into the workings of this most private of institutions and the nature of the creative process itself.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated companion volume, edited by exhibition curator Micki McGee and published by Columbia University Press, and by a festival of public events that will take place in New York City and around the nation.