Robert Adams: The Place We Live,
A Retrospective Selection of Photographs

Organized by the Yale University Art Gallery from its master sets of Adams’s work, Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs is a multivenue traveling exhibition that traces Adams’s 45-year engagement with the evolving landscape of the American West. The various strands of this influential photographer's work—including his iconic portrayals of suburban Colorado and his elegiac views of once-verdant landscapes in southern California and the Pacific Northwest—have been woven together for the first time into a cohesive epic that addresses the contemporary American experience. Created in conjunction with the exhibition and its accompanying three-volume publication, this Web site features more than 200 images, texts by the photographer, and an interactive timeline and bibliography that offer the opportunity to explore this seminal American artist's vision.

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Dura-Europos: Excavating Antiquity

The archaeological site of Dura-Europos, in modern Syria, is a fascinating crossroads of ancient cultures. It is perhaps best known for the important finds unearthed during the excavations in the 1920s and 1930s sponsored by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters. These discoveries included a shrine to the god Mithras, a synagogue whose assembly room walls were covered with painted biblical scenes, and one of the earliest Christian house churches. The paintings and sculpture from these buildings—and the over 12,000 artifacts of daily life excavated by the archaeologists now preserved at the Yale University Art Gallery—present a vivid picture of life in a Roman city in the third century A.D. Using photographs and other information from the excavation archives, this site enables viewers to explore the many wonders of Dura-Europos.

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John La Farge’s South Seas Sketchbooks

In August of 1890, American artist John La Farge (1835–1910) and historian Henry Adams (1838–1918) embarked on a journey to the South Pacific—Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Rarotonga, Fiji, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)—that would keep them away from home for more than a year. During this trip, La Farge strove to record, in sketches and notes, the landscapes and genre scenes that he encountered, filling a group of pocket sketchbooks and creating what could be described as a series of “visual diaries.” The sketchbooks featured on this site, from the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, are eleven of a total of just twelve known books from the La Farge–Adams trip to the South Seas in 1890–91. Created in conjunction with the exhibition John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891, this site allows visitors to peruse every page of each sketchbook.

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The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America

The Société Anonyme Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery is an exceptional anthology of European and American Art from 1920 to 1940. The collection was formed largely through the efforts of Katherine S. Dreier (1877–1952), an artist and educator who in 1920 founded the Société Anonyme in New York with artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The group's core mission was that artists, rather than historians, would chronicle the rise of modern art. The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, a major traveling exhibition organized by the Gallery, traces the transformation of this organization from its original conception as an exhibition initiative to an extraordinary modern art collection. Created in conjunction with the exhibition, this Web site presents information on a wide range of Société Anonyme artists, highlights major group exhibitions and activities, and tells the story of how the collection developed and later found its way to Yale University.

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There's No Place Like Home: Student Rooms at Yale, 1870–1910

Highlighting objects from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and Sterling Memorial Library, There's No Place Like Home: Student Rooms at Yale, 1870–1910, offers an enticing glimpse into how Yale students at the turn of the century took great care furnishing and documenting their rooms. Between 1869 and 1894, new dormitories, monumental in scale and lavish in design, were built along the New Haven Green on College Street in the area known today as Old Campus, gradually creating a self-contained quadrangle that quickly became the psychological center of the campus. Amid this growth, the distinctiveness of Yale College and campus life asserted itself. To commemorate their new living spaces, students commissioned professional photographers to document their fashionable interiors and to record intimate traces of their personal tastes and habits. This online exhibition is dedicated to exploring the ways in which students used objects to create a distinctive home for themselves at Yale.

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