University Library Exhibit Gallery
August 27, 2023 to July 15, 2024

Everyone must eat. Food is a basic necessity, but our daily engagement with it belies complex structural systems that undergird our ability to get a meal. When we eat, we connect with new and old traditions in personal ways that blend our values, identities, worldviews, and politics.
University Library Exhibit Gallery
September 15, 2022 to July 27, 2023

Bajito y Suavecito. Low and Slow. These words capture the innovation and creativity of lowriding as an American cultural practice. Lowriding has a style and art which is distinctly its own. It is more than just customized cars; it is a "way of life." Family, honor, pride, and respect are more than just words, they are social codes of lowrider car clubs....
Online
August 30, 2021 to July 15, 2022

Oral histories are intentionally-created sources that document personal experiences of the past. For several decades CSUN students, faculty, and others have conducted oral history interviews with individuals who lived through significant historical events, participated in social movements, or experienced cultural trends...
Online
August 22, 2020 to July 30, 2021

Los Angeles exists in our collective cultural imagination, heavily influenced by depictions of the city on film, though it is also a place of brick and mortar; adobe and asphalt. Los Angeles: On Film and On Record is an online journey through film and archives. It examines a number of popular films that feature the City of Angels within the storyline, setting, or both, and compares...
University Library Exhibit Gallery
August 15, 2019 to July 31, 2020

The environmental justice movement sees people of color, people of low socioeconomic status, indigenous peoples, immigrant populations, LGBTQ communities, and other marginalized groups as being disproportionately burdened by the presence and effects of ecologically harmful infrastructures like landfills, factories....
University Library Exhibit Gallery
August 31, 2018 to July 31, 2019

Civic engagement, or advocacy on behalf of the public, has long been a critical component of American life. While American women have been involved in public life for centuries, their early engagement was typically via male relatives. It was not until the 19th century that women truly entered the public sphere, engaging in public discourse around specific issues as a bloc. While these early actions helped women learn the power of civic participation, the 19th and early 20th century's suffrage movement, in which women engaged in advocacy and activism...
University Library Exhibit Gallery
August 31, 2017 to July 1, 2018

Archivists and librarians at CSUN have been building primary and archival research collections for several decades to help students and other researchers discover and analyze critical information about our collective past. Their great strength and challenge as research materials is that they present information without providing interpretation, analysis, or evaluation. Indeed, those who engage with primary and archival sources often encounter information not seen or considered by others. As a result, they can conduct original analysis, advance new arguments, and draw unique conclusions.
University Library Exhibit Gallery
January 31, 2017 to May 31, 2017

On display along the walls in the Library Exhibit Gallery are posters from the CSU Japanese American Digitization Project. As a part of the project, fifteen CSU campuses worked together to digitize letters, photographs, newsletters, and other materials that document the experiences of those imprisoned in camps during the war.
University Library Exhibit Gallery
January 16, 2015 to December 23, 2015

From the United States' earliest days the American West was lauded as a land of uncharted opportunity, with westward expansion the nation's ultimate destiny. California's mid-19th-century Gold Rush helped engender the myth of the state's endless possibilities. Late-19th-century descriptions of California as the "Land of Promise" and "Golden State" serve as further evidence of California's mythos and role in the American psyche as a place of affluence and growth.
University Library Exhibit Gallery
September 17, 2013 to December 19, 2014

Collective social action movements have been a part of American life since the nation's earliest days whether spontaneous expressions of dissent or high-reaching attempts to change society. While protest movements are not an exclusively American phenomenon, our ability to express dissent has become a defining characteristic of our American identity, rights, and freedoms.