Art Exhibitions & Programs
Our space may be limited, but art always has a place at the Jesup.
On any given day you’ll find art in temporary exhibitions filling the wall in our Periodicals Room, hanging from the mezzanine in our main Reading Room, displayed digitally on the monitor in the Rotunda, or as the topic of discussion at one of our regular programs and author talks. We rotate our exhibitions in the Periodicals Room on a monthly basis, host photo and film shoots in addition to our dance, theater, and concert programs, and welcome additional creative uses of our unique space.
If you’d like to display your art, please contact Laura Edwards at ledwards@jesuplibrary.org or (207) 288-4245. To organize a program or hold an art-making workshop, contact Kayla Chagnon at kchagnon@jesuplibrary.org. We’d love to hear your ideas!
The Jesup “Print Room”
From the beginning the arts mattered to the Jesup. We know this today because the room that for decades has been the Periodicals Room was once, shortly after its founding, known as the Jesup’s “Print Room.”
In its earliest days, the Jesup possessed a significant print collection by Rembrandt among others. An early board member, A. E. Gallatin, organized exhibitions in the Print Room by contemporary artists like John Singer Sargeant, and himself went on to found the Gallery of Living Art in New York City, considered the first museum devoted exclusively to modern art.
In 1916, one of the first solo exhibitions (pictured above) of the sculptor Paul Manship was installed at the Jesup by Edward Robinson, then Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Nearly three thousand people attended the exhibition over two weeks in August, and it was written about in national arts magazines.
Exploring this and other elements of the Jesup’s history is a passion of ours. You can follow our ongoing discoveries of the past at our History page.
Looking to the future
Art planning for the Jesup will always be a work in progress driven by community engagement. As the library works toward preservation and protection of its historically significant building and a much-needed expansion, it is also re-thinking the ways in which art display can be incorporated into the design for the new wing. Please contact us if you’d like to be involved in realizing this vision.
The Jesup would like to thank the members of our Jesup Arts Advisory Committee for their time, insight and vision for the place of art in modern libraries: Annette Carbajal, Susan Lerner, Carl Little, Amy Pollien, Dan Poteet (coordinator), Nancy Poteet, Sydney Roberts Rockefeller, Mike Rogers (landscape architect), Carol Shutt, Scott Simons (architect), Charlotte Singleton and Melita Westerlund.
