Exhibits
Little Women, Illustrated : The Exhibition
(case outside library entrance)
Coinciding with the Playhouse in the Park production of the playful drama, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (Jan. 17-Feb. 15, 2026), that unfolds as if Alcott is writing the novel in real time with characters based on her family, this exhibition highlights the work of a dozen illustrators who helped make this classic American novel so popular for 158 years
Featuring original books from UC Libraries and private collections published between 1868 and 2025, the display includes reproductions of art by and mini biographies of such celebrated American and English artists as:
May Alcott
Hammatt Billings
Clara M. Burd
Barbara Cooney
Betty Fraser
Millicent Etheldreda Gray
Louis Jámbor
Frank Merrill
Norman Rockwell
Jessie Willcox Smith
Harvé Stein
Alice Barber Stephens
Tasha Tudor
Book jackets, frontispieces, and illustrations bring to life the adventures, bonds, romances, and losses of four March sisters--Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy—coming of age in Civil War-era Massachusetts.
Depicted honestly in both words and images, these characters desire belonging, independence, love, and purpose. Their passions and contradictions make them eminently relatable, universal, and timeless.
Tauba Auerbach
(circulation desk case)
At 31, the American artist Tauba Auerbach has carved out an intriguing niche for herself in the art world, one that sits somewhere between the fields of science, craft, mathematics, and aesthetics. Curated by Sam Yeganeh, Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture and Adjunct Faculty at DAAP and Miami University, this exhibition brings together works that highlight Auerbach’s ingeniously analytical practice—marked by a manic precision that serves as a foil to the apparent languor of her visual language. She has rearranged the Bible into an alphabetical collection of letters, created striking three-dimensional paintings that ultimately reveal themselves as flat, and produced playful screen-static abstractions later used by Comme des Garçons in an advertising campaign.
Tauba grew up in San Francisco and now lives in New York, with a studio in Brooklyn and an apartment in Manhattan. But her optimism, she says, still functions on a sunny Californian level. Which is about right for someone who believes in a fourth dimension of color.
The Wooden Dolls by Alexander Girard
(entryway cases)
The Wooden Dolls by Alexander Girard are a large family of wooden figures representing human and animal characters. Girard designed them in 1952 for his own use as decorative objects for his home.
Furniture Miniatures Collection
(freestanding cases on first floor of library)
For over two decades, the Vitra Design Museum has been making miniature replicas of milestones in furniture design from its collection. The Furniture Miniatures Collection encapsulates the entire history of industrial furniture design – moving from Historicism and Art Nouveau to the Bauhaus and New Objectivity, from Radical Design and Postmodernism all the way up to the present day.