Schomburg Center Centennial Launch and Exhibition
Off-Campus Arts Event
Schomburg Center Centennial Launch and Exhibition
Celebrate the centenary of the Schomburg Center in this open house of archival divisions, important dialogues contextualizing the center’s development and evolution, and close with a public celebration marking its historic past and vital future.
FREE
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
May 08, 2025 | 11:00 am
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Event details

During this launch, visitors are invited to an open house of archival divisions, important dialogues contextualizing the center’s development and evolution, and close with a public celebration marking its historic past and vital future.

Get there early to enjoy tours of 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity, an exhibition exploring the library’s history through the prism of place, people, and material culture.

History of the Center

The Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints—the forerunner to today’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—opened on May 8, 1925 as a special collection of the 135th Street Branch Library

Within the Negro Division’s reading room, students and scholars accessed special and rare collection items like Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), Pietro Calvi’s sculpture Ira Aldridge as Othello, and an original edition of verse by Phillis Wheatley. The collections, then, like now were multidisciplinary and multi-modal, representing the breadth of intellectual and cultural production across the African diaspora.

Location

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Blvd
New York, NY

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Event Schedule

11AM | Exhibition Opening

12PM | Opening Ritual at Rivers cosmogram and Archival Divisions Open House

Explore the collections in each of our five divisions and gain insight from our curators, archivists and librarians.

12:30PM | Librarian of the Harlem Renaissance: Catherine Latimer, the First Black Librarian at NYPL

A conversation with Rhonda Evans, Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at The New York Botanical Garden and former Assistant Chief Librarian in the Jean Blackwell Huston Research and Reference Division from 2019-2023

2 PM | Rebuilding the Past, Making the Future

A conversation with Schomburg Directors Howard Dodson (1984–2011), Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2011-2016), and Joy Bivins (Current).

3:15 PM | 20th Century Harlem: An Evolving Site of Black Placemaking

A conversation with panelists Veronica Chambers (author and editor of Narrative Projects, NYTimes), Denise Murell, PhD (curator, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, The Met), Dr. Jeffrey C. Stewart (author, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke) and exhibition presentation by Joy Bivins.

4:30 PM | Art of the Moment: Dedication of the Rivers Cosmogram

Former Schomburg Staff member Nashormeh N.R. Lindo with photographer Chester Higgins discussing that iconic moment between Dr. Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka.

Image: Courtesy of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture