The Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso Exhibition Gallery is located on the Second Floor.
Assunta Peluso
(Moscow, Late 30's)
| 
Ignazio Peluso
(Moscow, Late 30's)
|
Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso
Exhibition Gallery Dedication
March 14, 2008
Slideshow Presentation
The New York Society Library proudly dedicated the Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso Exhibition Gallery on March 14, 2008. More than 120 Library members, their guests and staff attended the festive celebration, which featured remarks by Board Chair, Charles Berry; Trustee, Jeannette Watson Sanger and Ada Peluso. Through the extraordinary generosity of Ada and Romano, the Gallery is named in memory of their parents, Ignazio and Assunta Sommella Peluso.
Exhibition Gallery Dedication Remarks
Charles Berry
March 14, 2008
We are delighted to have you all here today on this wonderful occasion of the inauguration of the Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso Gallery. It is a particular pleasure for me to say a few words about the Peluso Family and the landmark gift they have so generously made. Ada and Romano Peluso are here this evening, and we are glad so many of you could join us in honoring them and their parents and thanking them for their remarkably philanthropy.
Ignazio Peluso was a member of the Library for a number of years before he died in 1981, and his daughter Ada has continued the membership since then. The entire Peluso family were and are great readers and lovers of books. The senior Mr. Peluso was an Italian diplomat who had postings in Moscow and various parts of Europe before World War II. His wife Assunta had been a teacher and earned a PhD in Economics. After they came to this country, Ignazio Peluso served at the Italian Embassy in Washington and was Chief Chancellor of the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations. A resident of the Upper East Side, he first discovered the New York Society Library after his retirement, and he came to treasure this special place for books and reading.
Ada and Romano Peluso have followed their parents' footsteps as cultured and enlightened citizens with a keen sense of civic dedication. For more than 40 years Ada has been on the faculty at Hunter College, where she has served for many years as the Chair of their Department of Mathematics. Her brother Romano shares her combination of interest and skill in both numbers and letters: he is one of the foremost experts on corporate trust matters, having served for most of his professional career in the corporate trust departments of leading financial institutions here in New York and having published widely and authoritatively on a subject that is arcane to many but -- as some of us who work on the legal side of that world know -- extremely important, particularly in these times of uneasy financial markets.
Both Ada and Romano are remarkable for their exemplary philanthropy of which we are so fortunate to be beneficiaries. They have made significant gifts to Hunter College and donations of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have had the pleasure of getting to know them over the past year, and they are a model for us all: modest and unassuming but discerning in their tastes and purposeful in their charitable dedication.
Outside we have a lovely exhibition that Harriet Shapiro and others have put together of some mementoes from the Peluso Family, including books that were important to them growing up and a few of the treasures that they have collected. We are grateful to Ada and Romano for sharing these beautiful books with us today.
Ada will say a few words in a minute, but before I turn the podium over to her, I would like to make a couple of observations. First, a gift of the magnitude that the Pelusos have so kindly made has the potential to be transformative for our institution. Although many of our members and others who know us assume that we are well-off financially, in fact, as I have tried to emphasize in some of my contributions to the Library's newsletter, we have significant needs that can only be met by significant philanthropy, whether lifetime gifts or bequests, which have traditionally been so crucial to our financial health. What is so wonderful about the Pelusos' gift is that it sets an example. Some months ago I was discussing this with Ada, and she said with great conviction and warmth that in her experience making gifts of this significance will inevitably lead to major gifts by others. I share that conviction and am particularly grateful for Ada and Romano for showing the way.
The other observation I wanted to make is that this gift sheds light on the important impact that the Library has on the lives of its members. For many we are aware of that impact on an almost daily basis; but for others we don't learn of it until much later, in the form of a gift or bequest. It is wonderfully heartening to know that we have had such an impact on the Peluso Family, and I ask you to join me in thanking them for this marvelous gift for which we have the honor of naming our exhibition gallery the Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso Gallery. Thank you.
Exhibition Gallery Dedication Remarks
Jeannette Watson-Sanger
March 14, 2008
I was asked to become a trustee of this Library nearly thirty years ago. At that point I had never been in the Library, and I thought "Society Library" meant members had to be in the Social Register.
Over my years as a trustee, one of the things I most enjoy is my involvement with the exhibition space. When I was a little girl I read novels about lucky children who went up to their grandparents' attic and discovered various exciting ancient treasures. I felt as though I had found the attic of my fantasies when, in 1996, Mark Piel, our former Head Librarian, took me behind the scenes in the Library, to Stack 8, which was crammed with amazing historical artifacts.
I was thrilled to hold the dusty ancient charging ledger and to see the entry where George Washington borrowed The Law of Nations - which he never returned. (One day I will travel to Mount Vernon to collect late fees!) Later the Library switched to charging cards and, as a literary voyeur, I could have spent hours poring over the cards of W.H. Auden and Willa Cather. I adored seeing the minutes dating from 1754 and an ancient New York Society Library wooden seal press.
I felt that these and other treasures were so extraordinary that we should have a permanent exhibition space at the Library, so the public could have the same pleasure that I did in viewing them.
These artifacts were the inspiration for what has become the Library's flourishing exhibition program. I find that these ancient treasures truly make the Library's illustrious history come alive.
In the early days of creating the exhibition space, my guiding light was the enchanting and unforgettable Maggie Byard, a trustee of the Library and wife of the late Spencer Byard, a former Board president. Maggie had been a member of the Library since 1937 when she wheeled her eldest child in a pram to investigate the new site. Maggie was an expert in 17th-century English literature who taught at Rutgers and Columbia, as well as an accomplished pianist.
I loved working on the exhibition space with Maggie because in addition to being brilliant, she was tremendous fun! We combed the city together looking for the perfect display cases. We finally found them at the Morgan Library, and they will continue to serve us well in our newly inaugurated Peluso Exhibition Gallery.
In addition to Maggie we had a very active committee. Henry Cooper applied his formidable literary and historical skills to creating the wall-panel text for our first exhibition. Jenny Lawrence was an invaluable aid with her wise and thoughtful counsel.
Maggie brought in our remarkable Harriet Shapiro, whose father had been a close friend of hers. Harriet's insight and brilliance at investigative research have truly brought our exhibitions to life. She discovers just the fact or story to breathe life and humor into an exhibit.
On October 23, 1996, the first exhibition, New York's Oldest Library: The New York Society Library, Its Life and Times, opened to much praise. Among the items on display was the charter granted to the Library by King George III, Bernard Ratzer's 1767 map of the area around New York Harbor, and the charging records of Library subscribers from Chief Justice John Jay to Herman Melville. A timeline with a chronology of people and events in the Library's history from 1754 to 1937 was mounted on the walls behind the exhibition cases. That timeline was used as the front and end papers of the Library's 250th-anniversary book.
Other, more recent exhibitions have highlighted the Library's Special Collections - the Winthrop, Hammond, Green, and Sharaff/Sze Collections.
Bringing Home the Exotic: Europeans as Foreigners 1670-1840 was curated by Sara Holliday. Currently on view in the Gallery we have The Library Moves Uptown: A Celebration of Seventy Years on 79th Street.
Now, with the inauguration of the Peluso Exhibition Gallery, we look to the future. This fall we will be featuring an exhibition of brass books by artist Christopher Hewat, who creates beautiful books to hold and dream on, but not to read. It is his first New York show. Also in the works is The President's Wife and the Librarian, an exhibition which will feature unpublished letters, hidden in the archives of Harvard's Houghton Library, from Theodore Roosevelt's wife Edith Kermit Roosevelt to her close friend Marion King, Assistant Librarian at The New York Society Library. We are also planning an exhibit on the first books purchased by this Library. We have so much to look forward to.
And so I would like to add my thanks to the Pelusos for this extraordinary gift. I am delighted to have Ada Peluso as a member of the Lecture and Exhibition Committee. Thanks for coming, and please enjoy the exhibition.
Exhibition Gallery - Historic Photo
|