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NEW YORK STORY: JEROME ROBBINS AND HIS WORLD Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Exhibition Curated by Lynn Garafola March 25 – June 28, 2008 The labels, wall exits, and reflections that follow are an effort to revisit an exhibition that did not, alas, have a published catalogue or a robust website. Exhibitions are like performances. When they close, they are dismantled, and the objects, their magic gone, sent back to their boxes. In revisiting this material, I wanted to evoke the experience of walking through the Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with the reader enjoying by suggestion and as an act of imagination the numerous objects on display tracing the remarkable career of Jerome Robbins as an artist of the ballet, Broadway, and concert stage in mid-twentieth-century New York. This is the second of three exhibitions I have curated about ballet in New York City from the 1930s to the late twentieth century. As such it complements Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet (New-York Historical Society, 1999) and Arthur Mitchell: Harlem’s Ballet Trailblazer (Wallach Art Gallery, 2018). To revisit these exhibitions digitally, see “Dance for a City” Revisited (https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:qrfj6q5763) and the Mitchell exhibition website (https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/mitchell). In preparing this material for publication on the Columbia University Commons, I have modified some of the labels, adding explanatory text when it seemed necessary as well as excerpts from letters and telegrams that exhibition visitors could read for themselves.
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