The Sutro Library mounts four physical exhibits in its reading room each year (excepting the recent pandemic). Additionally, the Sutro Library has, along with thousands of other cultural institutions worldwide, partnered with Google Arts and Culture to create virtual exhibits on the 2017 Women’s March and other interesting topics.
Our new exhibit explores the building of Mexico’s railroad in the nineteenth century. Through documents, photographs, and pamphlets, the exhibit looks at the revolution in transportation, industry, and culture that transformed almost every aspect of Mexican life. Exhibit runs September through December 2024.
Our new exhibit focuses on caricature and satire in society. From Hogarth to Gillray to Punch magazine to France’s Dampier, illustrated satire captures, reflects, and relates ideas, provoking a critical eye towards politics and culture. It is also one of the ways in which society can convey their pleasure in, or ridicule of, the powerful. Exhibit runs June 2024 through the end of August 2024.
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Sutro Library has partnered with Google Arts and Culture to launch an online exhibit of posters from our 2017 Women’s March Collection.
Our new exhibit titled Land of the Unexpected A Journey to the South Pacific is a collaboration between Sutro Library and San Francisco State University’s Global Museum. It features artifacts and books which explore Papua New Guinea’s diverse culture and ecosystems. It runs through the end of April 2024.
See the Land of the Unexpected A Journey to the South Pacific book list
Exhibit runs August 2023 through the end of December 2023.
This exhibit delves deep into the Sutro archive to explore the many ways in which humans have experienced disaster, both natural and man-made, since time immemorial. Devastating catastrophes such as disease, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, and shipwrecks changed the ebb and flow of history, affecting populations, economies, and climate.
See the From Earthquakes to Epidemics: Historic Disasters book list
Exhibit runs April 2023 through the end of July 2023.
Imagine a world without travel, without transportation, and without trade — it’s inconceivable. This exhibit explored the many ways in which humans have moved goods and people.
January 2023 through April 2023
Come explore history through the lens of Sutro Library‘s broadsides and newspapers. Open on 5th floor of Sutro Library. Hours are Tuesday through Thursday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm.
Exhibit lasts through the end of the October 2022. Open on 5th floor of J.Paul Leonard Library-Sutro Library. Hours are Tuesday through Thursday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm.
Looks at human habitation from Neolithic to modern man. Items range from the 1500s through 1800s.
For guided tour, please email Diana Kohnke.
On display are images from the 1490s through the 1900s, featuring specimens from a Herbarium collected in North American in the early 1700s, illustrations of Jethro Tull’s revolutionary work on husbandry, and much more!
Cancelled due to COVID.
On a list of what to do while in San Francisco, at the top is most certainly a visit to Golden Gate Park. This year marks the 150th anniversary with 100 institutions throughout San Francisco participating in some way to celebrate Golden Gate Park’s past, present, and future. One of the largest parks in the world at 1017 acres (New York’s Central Park is 843), its origins and that of San Francisco’s rise to prominence are parallel tales.
November 2019 – February 2020
This exhibition unites objects from the Sutro collection of Egyptian artifacts (now under the stewardship of SF State’s Global Museum) with archival material and antiquarian books from the Sutro Library. Items in the exhibit range from 1550 BCE through the nineteenth century.
See the book list for Egypt Through the Eyes of Sutro.
August 2019 – October 2020
An exploration of the intersection of culture, performance, and theatre. The exhibit featured items on dance, carnival, political caricature, ephemera, and other rare books relating to theatre and performance — including ritual.
See the book list for All the World is a Stage: Performance, Theatre, and Culture.
In our excitement for the final season of Game of Thrones, Sutro Library teamed up with the J. Paul Leonard Library to host a pop-up exhibit where we shared historic resources related to the themes and imagery of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire (the source material for the show). Even though the series is based on medieval English history (e.g. War of Roses), Sutro Library made connections to various titles found within our special collections from military maneuvers to historic figures that closely match the characters.
April 2019 – June 2020
Explore the making of the modern world through illustrations and photographs of the technology, machinery, and culture of the nineteenth century.
See the book list for Images of the Industrial Revolution.
January 2019 – March 2019
Creative. Resilient. Brave. Industrious. The Sutro Library explores the many and varied representations of women through the ages. Exploring what they tell us about our culture today, and about women throughout history.
October 2018 – December 2018
In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month this exhibit focused on the extensive collection of Mexicana at the Sutro. On display were illustrations, caricatures, and photographs that represented the diverse and complex history of Mexico from the Aztecs up to the Mexican Punitive Expedition which began in 1916 and ended in 1917. Of particular note, an Aztec codex called the Codex of Santa Maria Calacohuayan in Nahuatl, circa 1650, was displayed.
June 2018 – August 2018
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of November 11, 1918, which ended the fighting of World War I, Sutro’s exhibit displayed a broad range of artifacts, books, and illustrations on the subject of warfare, dating from the sixteenth through the twentieth century.
See the book list for War in the Archive.
April 2018 – June 2018
The Enlightenment fueled Europeans to embark on voyages of discovery during the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century. They sought to gather specimens and to document and catalog newly discovered flora and fauna that would crowd the cabinets of Natural History Museums. The illustrations in the exhibit reflected the way in which art and science met.
January 2018 – March 2018
Throughout history the clothes that we wear speak volumes about our identity. Whether it is geographic residence, occupation, gender, class, religion, or ethnicity, the garments we dress in can define our place in the world. This exhibit explored clothing throughout history and the ways in which sartorial choices continue to express the circumstances of our existence.
September 2017 – December 2017
Sutro Library’s exhibit explored the image as artifact. Prior to photography, the eager public relied on master illustrators and artists to provide visuals showing the animals, people, places, food, temples, rivers and cities of faraway lands. Sutro’s exhibit juxtaposes early examples of illustrated travel narratives of Mexico, Peru, India, Egypt, Japan, Florida, and Cuba with their photographic cousins. The Sutro Library’s exhibit was in conjunction with a complimentary exhibit mounted at SFSU School of Art’s Fine Arts Gallery.
See the book list for Recollected: Photography and the Archive.
July 2017 – September 2017
Exhibit commemorated the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco which saw youth from around the world converge on San Francisco heady with progressive ideas of peace, community, love, and freedom — notions which fueled the culture, music, and literature of the time. Sutro Library’s exhibit looked to past antecedents to the iconic Summer of Love: early Astronomy books, Phrenology, Alchemy, Palmistry, Spiritualism, magic, Utopian communities, and Mesmerism, showing that there is nothing new under the sun.
February 2017 – May 2017
Almost unknown today, extra-illustration was a wildly popular activity that lasted for almost one hundred and fifty years. The exhibition explored this significant part of bookbinding history and printing history, one almost entirely lost to posterity — namely extra-illustration or grangerization — as it often referred. Sutro Library’s display includes a wide array of these types of works, which involved an individual unbinding a book then rebinding it with inserted illustrations and other artifacts in order to visually represent the subjects at hand.
October 2017 – December 2017
The Americas have been a place of conquest and conflict. New Western historians, such as Patricia Limerick, have long spoken about the West as a place where cultures clashed, often violently, and this exhibit investigated and offered insight into that notion through images, maps, atlases, manuscripts, and books. Questions about the power of print and the ways in which, for centuries, conquest and conflict were reified through books and other documents were considered through primary sources.
March 2016 – June 2016
The items on exhibit are primarily from the Sutro Library’s Yemenite Hebraica collection. Purchased in 1884 from the estate of nineteenth century antiquities dealer, Moses W. Shapira, the manuscripts in this collection have the potential to shed new light on the rich cultural and religious history of the Yemenite Jews. A story about the doomed Shapira is told in the book by San Francisco State Professor Chanan Tigay, titled The Lost Book of Moses, set to be released in March, 2016. This exhibit runs through the end of June, 2016.
The Women’s March was a worldwide protest that happened on January 21, 2017. Marches occurred across California, the United States, and the world. The event drew millions of people, and photographs of posters from the march were immediately circulated on social media as well as traditional media.