I contributed an introductory essay and a selection of images from All the Women I Know to Heide Hinrich’s marvelous shelf documents, edited with Jo-ey Tang and Elizabeth Haines. The project assembles artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians to reflect on the art library as a generative resource and site for all who identify as queer, as women, as Black, as Indigenous, as people of colour.
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I lived in Brooklyn from 1988-2004, and in times of transition or deprivation, the many branches of the New York Public Library served as my adjunct studio. I loved working at its flagship location on 42nd Street. I could read and write and sketch. The Midtown Manhattan branch across the street holds a picture library—pages culled from deaccessioned books—that supplied images for my journals and zines. I didn’t have funds to pay studio rent but I could still make art in fellowship with other workers, whatever their pursuits. The library provided a form of refuge that resonated with my needs and sensibilities as an artist. Solitude is an essential element of artistic practice, but I rebel against the fantasy of the artist toiling in isolation from the world, this ideological freight of a conservatory model of art education. In the library, you are always reminded that your work is tethered to the social.
I carried my attachment to the library as studio into my teaching at Ohio University. When I bring studio art classes to the library, I ask students: if we think of the library as a repository of knowledge, what does our library know? Why is this book in the collection and not another? I want them to understand the hierarchical nature of the space so that they can find the information they need but also understand the political costs of access, how this determines what’s on the shelf. Choice is bound up in privilege and it’s instructive to understand how institutional accessibility is determined by this calculus. As an antidote, I emphasize the potentials of chance in research. I want students to see the radical possibilities of the chance encounter and how these moments open up lateral fields of disruption and connection. Grab a volume because you like the color of the binding. Check out a novel that your crush is reading. Serendipity and desire as search engine rooted in the experience of the subjective body.
For a foundations course in studio concepts, I assign a project where the students produce a site-specific work in the university’s library. I encourage the students to use the resources at hand when responding to the site rather than introducing conventional art materials. In a haunting performance, Nick, a graphic design student, directed his peers to wander the stacks. At his cue, everyone stopped and grabbed a book from the shelf. Each student was then asked to begin reading aloud from their book in a whisper while slowly walking up and down the aisles. The participants had to balance several states at once—quiet recitation while pacing, calibrating the route of their bodies and the volume of their voices in accordance with the group. They hummed—absorbed in their sentient experience and attuned to the collective.
second shelf begins with the inescapable fact that women, queer, and BIPOC artists are systemically excluded from the institutions that shape the art world: schools, archives, publishing, granting foundations, non-profit and commercial venues. It’s disheartening if familiar news that underrepresentation will remain a battle for liberatory practices. At its heart, Heide Hinrichs’s collaborative project extends beyond the necessary act of corrective and pivots towards the radical possibilities that are governed by chance. Like all hierarchical structures, the library is a vulnerable site, ready to be pierced, dismantled, and rebuilt. I imagine a student encountering this collection of works. Does it feel like a gift? A secret society? How can the experience of disorientation open up new paths of inquiry? second shelf speaks to the pleasures of promiscuous discovery and the transformative power of communion in the library.