Online Exhibitions

  • Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward

     In conjunction with the exhibition Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward, being held at the Library for the Performing Arts through August 18, 2012, is an online companion exhibition.

  • 500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection

    500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection pays tribute both to the rich history of Italian dance and to the remarkable Cia Fornaroli Collection, a jewel of the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

  • Best of Times: The Theatre of Charles Dickens

    Dickens's passion for the theater began in his childhood; his influence upon the theater continues today. Best of Times: The Theatre of Charles Dickens is illustrated with rare 19th-century broadsides, prints, posters, photographs, programs, and the original, annotated promptbooks used by Dickens during his vastly popular public readings. The exhibition highlights Dickens as performer, as playwright, and as the author upon whose works countless adaptations for the theater have been based.

  • Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-garde America

    This multimedia exhibition, which draws on rare material housed in all four research divisions of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, focuses on the liberating force of archaic and classical Greece and the countless 20th-century American choreographers, theater artists, composers, visual artists, and designers it inspired.

  • Touring West: 19th-century Performing Artists on the Overland Trails

    This online exhibition spotlights the professional performances by dancers, actors, slack- and tightrope walkers, jugglers, acrobats, singers, instrumental artists, authors, political activists, and orators who toured the United States from the time of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) through the 19th century.

  • Transformations: A Celebration of the Creative Spirit in the Performing Arts

    To celebrate the reopening of its Lincoln Center home, now named the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presents Transformations, an exhibition on transformations inherent to the creative process. This first exhibition in the renovated Library will fill both redesigned galleries and features treasures drawn from the nine million objects in the Library's collections in music, dance, theater, and recorded sound.

  • Vaslav Nijinsky: Creating a New Artistic Era

    Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950) was one of the 20th century's preeminent artists. The exhibition focuses on his career as a dancer and choreographer in a time marked by international disruptions of war as well as avant-garde collaborations and artistic energy. Nijinsky was a principal member of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg and then became an international star through his performances with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in its seasons in Western Europe, from 1908. His celebrity and lasting fame resulted from his premiere performances in Mikhail Fokine ballets such as Petrouchka and Les Sylphides.

  • Vaudeville Nation

    Vaudeville has been called the most influential entertainment genre in the nation's history. Vaudeville, and the related forms such as burlesque and prologs, provided freedom for self-expression of social and political commentary.