The John Hay Library opened its doors in 1910 as the new main library for the expanding Brown University campus. In 1964, when the main collection was moved to the recently-built John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, the John Hay Library assumed it’s current vocation of housing special collections. Today it has hundreds of special collections and archives, which are made up of over 3 million primary and secondary sources. One is the Albert E. Lownes Collection of Significant Books in the History of Science, which reaches back to the 1400s and includes rare books by likes of Isaac Newton and other early pioneers of science, but the list is endless. The archives of the Ladd Observatory are housed here.
The building’s Beaux-Arts style architecture features the large open Willis Reading Room, with 30+ foot ceilings and a mix of Italian Renaissance, Greek and Roman decorative elements, which is where the Intercalary works were available to the public in five display cases. [map]
- Intercalary Study Lamp
- Jocelyne Prince
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Intercalary Study Lamp is a hybrid lamp and orrey. Watching the sun move throughout the day in the Willi...
- Feline Bezoar Discovery Reports
- Sean Salstrom
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Feline Bezoar Discovery Reports is inspired by the whalers’ search for cetaceans and, by proxy, am...
- Molten Ambergris
- Sean Salstrom
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Thinking of ambergris as something that was be consumed but was difficult to digest. Salstrom took consumables in...
- But Now to Return to Our Sun
- Katie Bullock
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But Now to Return to Our Sun is an installation composed of traced text fragments sourced from an assort...
- Newton’s Observations
- Jocelyne Prince
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Newton’s Observations uses Newton’s rings to evoke phenomena that occur on the less-visible scale. The r...