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Special Collections Exhibit

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Setting the Scene: Exploring the Place of Landscape Photography in Oregon Print Culture” is our latest exhibit on display on the 2nd floor lobby of the State Library building. Landscape coffee-table books, souvenir viewbooks, travel brochures, postcards, and other photo objects celebrate a century of Oregon’s rich heritage publishing landscape photography. 

Featured artists include Carleton Watkins, Lee Moorhouse, Sarah Ladd, Benjamin and Ralph Gifford, Ray Atkeson, Robert Adams, and Terry Toedtemeier. The exhibit will be on display Monday through Friday during open building hours through December 2022. 



View the full exhibit on the 2nd floor of the State Library. 
Open Monday-Friday from 8am-5pm.
 
 
 
 

Past Exhibits

Publications of the People: the History and Art of Oregon Documents 


An exhibit titled “Publications of the People: the History and Art of Oregon Documents” is now open on the second floor of the State Library. The exhibit discusses the rise in the use of illustration and design in the 1930s and 1940s to accentuate official state publications issued by Oregon state agencies. Covers of actual state documents including Blue Books, road maps, and travel brochures will be displayed.


Since 1907, Oregon state law has required the State Library to collect and distribute Oregon state publications. To date there are more than 220,000 physical items in the Oregon Document collection and another 40 thousand plus online state documents which are available via the Internet from the Oregon Digital Collections.

 


Photograph of display 

​Built with Pride and Purpose: Oregon's Majestic Timberline Lodge 

The second floor exhibit for 2018 tells the story of recreation on Mount Hood and the planning and building of Timberline Lodge, using historic books, magazines, pamphlets and maps from the library’s Special and regular collections. The centerpiece of the exhibit is The Crafts of Timberline, a presentation album of photographs and plans of furniture and textiles hand crafted for the Lodge. A copy of the album was presented to Eleanor Roosevelt. Only 3 or 4 of these albums were made.

Black/White photo of the Timberline Lodge  

Timberline Lodge is the crown jewel of Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects in Oregon. When WPA funds were made available for the project in December 1935, Gilbert Stanley Underwood was selected as principal architect and Margery Hoffman Smith was selected the interior designer. Workers on the project came primarily from the WPA, but some jobs were performed by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Lodge was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on September 28, 1937, was officially turned over to the Forest Service in January 1938, and opened to the public in February of that year.


Cover of Oregon Outdoors magazine from Dec. 1946   Advertisement for Mt. Hood Timberline Lodge Resort
 
View the full exhibit on the 2nd floor of the State Library. 

Open Monday-Friday from 8am-5pm.

Photograph of Exhibit

A new exhibit is on display in the second floor lobby of the Oregon State Library. "Sister Libraries: 30 years of International Friendship and Exchange" chronicles the history of the fruitful relationship between the libraries of Fujian Province in China and the libraries of Oregon.

The Fujian-Oregon relationship began in 1984, when Governors Hu Ping and Vic Atiyeh signed a sister state relationship agreement. Three years later in March 1987, Rosalind Wang, Education Librarian at Portland State University, was invited by the Fujian Provincial Library and Fuzhou University to conduct workshops for library personnel from Fujian province. During the trip, Wang was asked by Provincial Library officials to assist with the creation of a sister library relationship between the Oregon State Library and Provincial Library.
Sister-Library Proclamation document 
The resulting “Proposal on the Cooperation between Fujian Provincial Library and Oregon State Library: Two Sister Libraries” called for book exchanges, mutual assistance with reference work, and staff and technology exchanges. The agreement was finalized on July 20, 1989, by officials from the Provincial Library on a visit to Oregon and Wes Doak, the state librarian at the time. Also in 1989, Dr. Layton Horner of Arizona made a gift to the Oregon State Library to help sponsor library staff exchanges between Fujian and Oregon.
 
Since then, there have been 38 Horner Exchange delegates – 22 from Fujian, 15 from Oregon, and 1 from Southwest Washington. There have also been at leave five shipments of gift books to Fujian totaling more than 47,000 volumes.

Books on display Printed materials from the exhibit Tea cup from the exhibit

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A new exhibit, Hops and Flax: Pride of the Willamette Valley, is now on display on the second floor across from the State Librarian's office.

The exhibit looks at the importance of these two specialty crops to Oregon's economy past and present. Items from our collection include photos taken during the 1930s by noted photographer, Dorothea Lange, and many others from the Trover Studio Collection that documents life in the Willamette Valley from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s.

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In addition to the photos, there are several books and pamphlets about the two commercial crops, as well as early Pacific Northwest hop farmer Ezra Meeker’s influential growing and harvesting guide, Hop Culture in the United States.

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