Arts, Briefly

Arts, Briefly: Library Arts Program Has Big First Year, New York Times, August 17, 2019, p. C3

     It’s been one year since public library cardholders in New York’s five boroughs were given expanded — and free— access to the Arts through the city wide Culture Pass initiative.     Since the program’s beginning in July 2018, over 70,0000 people seem to have taken the libraries up on their offer and signed up for the pass, the city’s public libraries said Tuesday.

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     This program allows library patrons to reserve free passes for participating museums and other cultural venues. It proved to be so popular that tickets ran out for MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, while some of the lesser-known museums had noticeable attendance growth.  

     One question about this kind of program is how to advertise and catalog it to make it sustainable in the long run.  The article notes that most people who signed up did so early on when the program was first announced.  That suggests that there may be a need for continuous promotion since an arts pass is not something people expect to find at a library. It’s an issue with any innovative  library service. It might start with a bang, but in the long term, how will patrons know it’s there?  For instance, I remember that my own public library had a program to check out a pass for State Parks.  It’s a great idea, but even though I'm a public library user I have no idea whether or not that program is still operating. 

The Cry Closet

Marina Gomberg, "The Cry Closet: Behind Nemo Millers Viral Sensation," Continuum: The Magazine of the University of Utah, Fall, 2018, pp. 14-15.

     University of Utah art student Nemo Miller's life changed on April 24, 2018 when her final project for her woodshed class became international news.
     It took one tweet from a fellow U student and about 24 hours for word about Miller's work, The Cry Closet, to reach nearly every corner of the globe. The response was uniformly emphatic, but ranged drastically in sentiment.
     Some thought the three-foot-by three-foot wide "safe place" installed in the J. Willard Marriott Library during finals week was the perfect antidote for stressed students who needed to take a breath, regain composure, and get back in  the action. Others, many of whom didn't realize the installation was an art piece and not an intervention devised by the university, deemed it an unnecessary measure to comfort an already overcoddled generation.

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     The author of this article doesn't quite capture the nature of the uproar over The Cry Closet, though she does mention that the work was installed in the library during the stress of finals week when emotions always run high. It's not that uncommon for distraught students to break down in tears. The librarians try to cope by hosting soothing activities like therapy dogs and yoga breaks.

     The course instructor, Professor Kelsey Harrison, said that the assignment was, "to design and fabricate an object that would solve a problem." The artist said, "I thought it would be funny to make a closet since I identify as a lesbian."  But whatever the artist intended,  The Cry Closet didn't seem like a very safe space to cry.  On one level, it seemed to endorse a kind of relational violence that first bullies people to the point of tears and then demands that they limit and conceal their distress.  Once it hit the Internet it really brought out the bullies.

     In the context of the library where surrounding tearful emotions were authentic The Cry Closet became a piece of site-specific performance art. In synergy with the location and the earnest efforts of librarians to offer stress relief for students it seemed like it could be real and it told us something about the way we treat each other that we didn't especially want to confront.  Learning is not always a safe space.  It can be extremely emotionally intense.  Despite claims that college provides a safe place to fail, actually failing often gets you attacked in various ways. Thanks to the display space in the library  The Cry Closet brought some of the unacknowledged cruelty of education out into the open and the artwork became deeply meaningful and actually shocking.

   

Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like 'New Genocide'

Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londono. Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like ‘New Genocide,” New  York Times, September 14, 2018, p. A4. 

“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” Said Jose Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum for more than a decade.  “We can still manage to put it out with buckets.”

    By the time they reached the centuries-old place , home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, flames had butted the building’s core and a dense column of smoke towered above it. 

…

“This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Gajajara said. “Because that was where our memories resided.”

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The grief of cultural loss is unbearable.

Libraries and archives preserve textual information, which means they privilege textual cultures whether they mean to or not.  Artifacts and texts that describe pre-genocide indigenous cultures were often collected by cultural outsiders. Yet those scraps of information are often all that’s left to reconstruct cultural memory.

In the University of Utah Marriott Library there is a truly beautiful artwork [1] that incorporates textual excerpts from the library collection of  Mormon pioneer diaries. The library is justifiably proud to highlight this special collection.  Still, the diaries tell a one-sided text-based story. The Mormon pioneers didn't move into an inhabited place. They settled a cultural landscape that was already occupied by Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo people. The diaries don't record non-textual cultural memory that is embedded in Utah’s desert landscape. That failure of information has real-world consequences. 

[1] Paul Housberg, Another Beautiful Day has Dawned Upon Us (2008). Handcrafted, kiln cast colored glass silvered on the back. Selected diary passages, from the Library’s private collection about the westward migration, are included in the four unique murals. The work was commissioned by the State of Utah as part of Utah’s Percent-for-Art Program, 2008.