Pages of the Past: The Breukelen Adventures of Jasper Danckaerts
Exhibit Dates: June 6, 2009 – May 16, 2010
In 1679 Jasper Danckaerts and his colleague Peter Sluyter came to New York in search of land for a religious colony. For 200 years Danckaerts’ meticulously written and illustrated diaries lay undiscovered until Henry C. Murphy, a founder of the Long Island Historical Society, (later renamed the Brooklyn Historical Society) came upon the diaries in 1864, in an Amsterdam book store. Now an important part of the BHS collection and an invaluable primary resource for scholars, the diaries are featured in an installation at BHS in celebration of the 400 Years of the Dutch in New York.
The exhibition Pages of the Past: The Breukelen Adventures of Jasper Danckaerts features these beautiful diaries and accompanying drawings and was curated by 19 high school students participating in the Brooklyn Historical Society’s educational program known as “Exhibition Laboratory”. In this program, high school students from four local schools are introduced to the art of exhibition preparation: they conduct research, select artifacts, write text and work with scholars and curators to understand how to communicate ideas through an exhibition. With the guidance of BHS staff and a team of scholars the students curated and designed this exhibition about the Danckaerts Journal.
Exhibition Laboratory is made possible through the generous funding of Timothy Bradley and Martha A. & Robert S. Rubin. Additional funding is provided by Astoria Federal Savings. Special thanks to Brooklyn Technical High School, Cobble Hill School of American Studies, The Packer Collegiate Institute and Saint Ann’s School.
