Greenwich Village Counterculture Chronicled at New York Public Library

Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 at the NYPL will focus on the extraordinary rise and fall of the first large-scale countercultural enclave in the United States.

Highlights from the exhibition which opens October 12 and runs through February 1, 2025,  will include:

• rare editions of influential Village-based little magazines such as Others, The Dial, The Glebe, The Little Review, The Seven Arts, The Pagan, and Rogue
• photographs of notable Villagers by Jessie Tarbox Beals, including portraits of Merton Clivette, Romany Marie, Tiny Tim, and Bobby Edwards, as well as photographs of popular Village hangouts, including the Washington Square Bookshop, the Samovar, Polly’s restaurant, and Hotel Brevoort
• a broadside advertising an Emma Goldman lecture on birth control held at Carnegie Hall
• first editions of John Reed’s and Louise Bryant’s firsthand accounts of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, published respectively as Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) and Six Red Months in Russia (1918)
• first edition printings of The Provincetown Plays (1916), series I–III
• the April 1920 issue of The Little Review that occasioned the Ulysses obscenity trial
• original costume design drawings for a performance of the Greenwich Village Follies (1920)

“Greenwich Village's bohemian scene of the 1910s and 1920s was a hotbed of aesthetic innovation and radical political activism, attracting and nurturing a who's who of cutting-edge artistic, literary, and intellectual talent,” Michael Inman, Susan Jaffe Tane Curator of Rare Books at The New York Public Library, said. “Influential in its own time, it also served as a template for future American countercultures and avant-gardes.”