The exhibition entitled “Inverted Histories: 150 Years of Queer Culture” focuses on primary research materials available in New York University’s Bobst Library for the study of gender and sexuality in English and American culture.
The exhibition entitled “Inverted Histories: 150 Years of Queer Culture” focuses on primary research materials available in New York University’s Bobst Library for the study of gender and sexuality in English and American culture. Free and open to the public, it is on display through September 15, 2005 in the Fales Collection, third floor of NYU’s Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For further information call 212.998.2596.
The Fales Collection holds a large array of materials for the study of gender and sexuality in English and American culture. This exhibition culls over 100 examples of different kinds of primary research materials by way of introduction to the kinds of queer scholarship available at Fales.
The Fales Collection contains over 200,000 volumes and given its breadth, there are numerous novels with queer content. “Inverted Histories” draws on those English and American novels from 1740 to the present, notable early German and English homosexual rights materials, gay and lesbian pulp novels, photographic materials, and archives all available in Fales, and also features material from the Downtown New York Collection. This collection documents the New York downtown arts scene from 1974 to the present and is especially rich in queer materials, including artworks by David Wojnarowicz and by the art collective, RepoHistory, which produced “Queer Spaces.”
According to Marvin Taylor, curator of the Fales Collection, this exhibition only gives a glimpse of what is available at Fales and attempts to show the breadth of NYU’s holdings and the variety of materials in the collection as a way of charting the changes in queer history.