This presentation by Thomas E. Hill on Vassar's Art Library was given on June 14, 2019, as part of the ARLIS/NA IRC Venice Study Tour. Libraries hold records of our cultural heritage as it is represented in documents, yet they are also in their materiality evidence of their own histories and the role these have played in the wider cultural story. At Vassar we delved deeply into the history of the architecture of the Art Library when renovating the original 1937 building. This attention to historic preservation was important because the building is the oldest modernist interior in the United States on an academic campus, and because it is material evidence of the story of modernism and its influence in North America. This recording is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).