Exhibition Poster Gallery
Curators use exhibition posters to introduce students, faculty, and the UC Berkeley campus community to a theme that can be found within the Library's collection. On the poster, the exhibit statement leads visitors through the space, and opens the didactic presentation to the viewer. The archived themes include exhibitions that focused on the life achievements of faculty and community figures like David Brower, to the development of Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies academic programs.
View online exhibitions lib.berkeley.edu/about/online-exhibits.
In 1969, one of the longest student-led strikes in UC Berkeley history gave birth to a movement that has lasted for five decades. The strike was organized by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of African American, Asian American, Chicanx, and Native American student organizations.
Inspired by liberation movements at home and abroad and the 1968 San Francisco State College TWLF strike, Berkeley’s TWLF demanded a Third World College and envisioned a radical and relevant education taught by and for people of color. The TWLF strike marked a turning point in UC Berkeley history, leading to the establishment of the Departments of Ethnic Studies and African American Studies and reverberating at universities and schools across the country. The legacy of the TWLF has inspired generations of students and fifty years later, the struggle for a liberatory education is as critical as ever. This exhibit tells this story through archives from the Ethnic Studies Library and The Bancroft Library.
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Whose University? The 50th Anniversary of the UC Berkeley Third World Liberation Front Strike: The Birth of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies and the Unfinished Struggle for a Liberatory Education
Curators: Sine Hwang Jensen, Lillian Castillo-Speed, and Corliss Lee; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2019
UC Berkeley Library News:
"50 years after Third World Liberation Front strike at UC Berkeley, legacy marches on", April 11, 2019
Journey through A Country Called Syria, a traveling exhibition that brings to life the history and heritage of Syrian culture. This unique exhibition allows its viewers to explore Syria from its ancient beginnings to the present and illustrates, among other topics, the invaluable contributions its people have made to the world and the current realities of civil war and refugee displacement they face. First showcased in May 2012, A Country Called Syria has grown to become a gallery of almost 500 pieces, each one highlighting or illustrating an essential aspect of Syria’s multi-faceted heritage.
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A Country Called Syria
Curator: Adnan Malik; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2017
This exhibition celebrates the San FranciscoExaminer newspaper photographers whose work appeared daily and often anonymously. With black and white sheet film and heavy, bulky cameras—stamina, steady hands, the ability to anticipate the action, and a dead-eye were the photojournalist’s minimum job requirements—they documented places and events to create an unparalleled visual history of San Francisco and the Bay Area in the twentieth century.
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25 Years In Black & White: Negatives from the Fang Family San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive, 1935-1960
Curator: Jack von Euw; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2008
A citizen of Berkeley for all his life, David Ross Brower is celebrated for shaping the modern environmental movement. An authentic sage and activist trailblazer, Brower fought to heal the Earth, to save the Grand Canyon, and to enlarge the national park and wilderness systems. He was a tireless advocate for clean water, free-flowing rivers, roadless wilderness, protected habitat, and a nuclear-free society. David Brower trod the world's stage with wit, diplomacy, and generosity of spirit, recruiting others from all walks of life to the international cause of conversation of our common resources. A dynamic, engaging, compelling speaker and writer, Brower was a true believer in the transformative power of words. This salute to his life and his monumental contributions to the preservation of the natural world is organized around memorable words from his written legacy. The Library joins with other organizations around the Bay Area in celebration of the centennial of his birth.
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David Ross Bower: A Force for Nature
Curators: Theresa Salazar and Susan Snyder; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2011
The exhibition No Legacy || Literatura electrónica (NL||LE) presents a collection of works of digital literature in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and English alongside print works of the 20th-century avant-garde. It gathers an unprecedented team of collaborators from across the UC Berkeley campus (the University Library, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Institute of European Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media) as well as national and international partners to showcase the impact of technology on literary production in the 21st-century networked world. (UC Berkeley Library Update, March 8, 2016, Claude Potts)
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No Legacy || Literatura Electrónica. Hispanic Legacies: The Trace of Experimental Writing in Writing in Spain and Latin America
Curators: Cody Hennesy, Claude Potts, Alexandra Saum Pascual, Stephanie Lie, Élika Ortega, and Students; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2016
This program started in 1958 under the direction of Herwin Schaefer, a Professor in the Decorative Arts Department at UC Berkeley, who believed that the best way to foster an appreciation of art is for students to live with original prints for a term.
During the inaugural exhibition, more than 5,000 guests passed through the Morrison Library to view this amazing collection of art. The prints were displayed for two weeks for anyone to view before they become available to any registered UC Berkeley student to rent for a single dollar. All of the 158 prints in the collection that first year were borrowed within two hours. Over the years, it was common for students to line up the night before the prints would start circulating in order to get the prints they desired. At the beginning of the spring quarter in 1967, David Smith, a biology student waited 25 hours and 15 minutes to borrow a lithograph by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
In 2008, on the program’s 50th anniversary, the prints in the collection were digitized for students to review on a GALC website, and the paper check-out cards were replaced with barcodes on the prints that allowed the prints to be borrowed through the Library’s online catalog. As a result, students might not line up anymore outside the Doe Library to get their prints, but they do get up early to request prints through their computers as soon as the prints begin circulating each year. This usually results in over 200 requests in the first few days the program is open.
There are currently nine other art lending programs at universities and colleges in the United States, but the Graphic Arts Loan Collection at the Morrison Library has the distinction of being the only one of these programs run by a university library. As of now, the GALC has more than 900 prints in its collection with around 100 that are too valuable to circulate. Some of these prints that do not normally circulate can be found on the walls and in the cases of this exhibition.
In the last 60 years the GALC has gone through many changes—including discontinuing rental fees and allowing students to borrow prints for a full academic year—but Professor Schaefer’s vision for the collection remains: to put original art in the hands of students.
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Art for the Asking: 60 Years of the Graphic Arts Loan Collection at the Morrison Library
Curators: Scott Peterson, Jennifer Osgood, Lynn Cunningham, Aisha Hamilton; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2019
UC Berkeley Library News:
"Art for the Asking: Library exhibit honors 60 years of sharing art", September 17, 2018
April 25, 1974 was at once an ending and a beginning. First and foremost it was the end of the Estado Novo dictatorial regime and the beginning of Portugal’s democratic process. The Estado Novo (New State) was one of the 1st in the wave of European fascist governments and it was also one of the longer lasting by remaining in power for more than four decades. In April of 1974, Portugal stood at the threshold of the last quarter of the twentieth century, developmentally 35 years behind most European nations. Its population was uneducated, unskilled, and impoverished while its ruling class was minuscule and monopolistic, tightly holding on to a dysfunctional and unsustainable colonial system. Once the hope that Marcelo Caetano would diverge from Salazar’s policies and lead Portugal towards democratization was shattered, it became clear that only a regime change could bring democracy to Portuguese citizens as well as providing the means for a peaceful resolution to the 13-year Colonial War and for the initiation of the decolonization process. Those were precisely the objectives that inspired the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas or MFA) to rise up against the oppressive state and overthrow the regime.
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Portugal's Carnation Revolution April 25, 1974
Curators: Claude Potts and Deolinda Adão; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2014
Since 1790, the U.S. census has impacted many aspects of our lives. It determines congressional apportionment, decides which communities receive a slice of $500,000,000,000 in federal funds, and provides information essential to policymaking.
Census questions also reflect the beliefs, concerns, and prejudices of their time, starting with the first census, which mandated that enslaved people be counted as three-fifths of a person. Over time, the census has reflected and responded to changing cultural norms, especially around race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.
Even with its limitations, the U.S. census is the best, and often only, source to examine the country’s demographic trends. Census information shows us the direction we are headed. It shines light on disparities and provides information crucial to civil rights enforcement, helping us improve as a society. But it can’t do any of this without participation, which is in jeopardy.
Because the census touches so many aspects of our society, we can’t cover everything in a single exhibit. We have selected areas we think are particularly important and invite you to explore the exhibit and some of the complexities — and the power — of this 230- year-old process.
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Power and the People: The U.S. Census and who counts
Lead Curators: Jesse Silva and Susan Edwards; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2019
UC Berkeley Library News:
"After Trump’s failed battle over the citizenship question, UC Berkeley Library exhibit explores the secret life of the U.S. census", September 24, 2019
Phoebe Apperson Hearst's first gifts to the University were for the Hearst Scholarship for women in 1891, and began a relationship of incredible generosity, much of it devoted to the welfare of women students. In 1898. she sponsored an international architectural competition which would transform the physical aspect of. the Berkeley campus. The Phoebe Apperson Hearst Plan began construction of Berkeley's core campus under the direction of architect John Galen Howard with the William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre (1903) and the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (1907). She funded the establishment of the Department of Anthropology in 1901 and the complete rehabilitation of a museum of anthropology in 1911. With these other donations large and small it is estimated that Phoebe Apperson Hearst's gifts to the University amounted to perhaps more than $100 million in today's dollars. The celebration of the centennial of the building of the Doe Library in 2011 and 2012 will recognize the impact of Mrs. Hearst on the development of this world class library.
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Building Berkeley: The Legacy of Phoebe Apperson Hearst
Curator: Bill Roberts; Designer: A. Hamilton
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library, UC Berkeley Library, 2011