Gallery Exhibits

  • Industry, Wealth, and Labor: Mapping New England Textile History

    Industry, Wealth, and Labor: Mapping New England Textile History The Osher Map Library’s recent acquisition of a collection of textile mill insurance plans from the American Textile History Museum provided the inspiration for this exhibition. Them...

  • North of Nowhere, West of the Moon: Myth, Fiction, and Fantasy in Maps

    North of Nowhere, West of the Moon: Myth, Fiction, and Fantasy in Maps was conceived in late-2021 as a "pop up" exhibition (a quickly organized and timely show) to showcase a long sought after new acquisition, Bernard Sleigh’s 1918 "An Anciente M...

  • Where Will We Go From Here? Travel in the Age of COVID-19

    “Where Will We Go From Here? Travel in the Age of COVID-19,” was conceptualized by Libby Bischof, Executive Director of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, as a way to utilize our historic cartographic collections t...

  • Mapping Maine: The Land and its Peoples, 1677–1842

      A Bicentennial Exhibition On view in the Bernard and Barbro Osher Gallery, September 10, 2020 to March 20, 2021. Let us acknowledge two truths:  1) on March 15th, 1820, the Eastern District of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts became the...

  • Mapping the Classroom: Teaching Geography and History in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century New England

    Exhibit Introduction:  "Mapping the Classroom" examines the ways in which the young men and women of New England were taught the subjects of History and Geography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by bringing visitors into the classrooms of...

  • All Aboard: Riding the Rails in New England and Beyond, 1830s – 1950s

    April 18, 2019 ~ September 14, 2019 ...   Railroads began to transform the American landscape as early as the 1830s. By 1850, cities were changing to accommodate the railroad industry, markets were expanding, and fortunes were being made by...

  • Stately Cartography: Fifty Maps of Fifty States

    November 1, 2018 ~ March 30, 2019 ... This exhibition features fifty individual maps of the fifty states that comprise the United States of America. While we are used to encountering individual maps of the towns, cities, counties, and states where ...

  • Art of the Spheres: Picturing the Cosmos since 1600

    March 29, 2018 ~ October 6, 2018 ... Art of the Spheres celebrates the manner in which astronomers have organized and comprehended the celestial vault, the planets, and the structure of the Cosmos. Every item in this exhibition was composed from mu...

  • Go Where the Map Takes You: The Intersection of Cartography and Creativity

    November 16, 2017 ~ March 10, 2018 ... Maps show many versions of our world, for many purposes, but their simplest purpose is to show the way from one place to another. The artists in this exhibition have used the techniques of mapping, and maps ...

  • The Northwest Passage: Navigating Old Beliefs and New Realities

    September 29, 2016 ~ March 11, 2017 ... One of the greatest stories of exploration and discovery is the quest for the Northwest Passage, an oceanic shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the top of North America. Tempted with the prospect...