Category: Library

[MDPLS] Assembling an Era

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An exhibition at the library.

Assembling an Era

The Miami-Dade Public Library System, 1971-1989

January 20 – March 27, 2011

Main Library, 1st and 2nd floor exhibition space, 101 W. Flagler Street, Miami, 305-375-2665

Reception and 40th anniversary kick-off event: January 20, 6:30 – 8:30pm

The 1970s and 80s represented a period of great progress, upheaval, and change in Miami-Dade County. Miami hosted both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The Mariel Boatlift and McDuffie Riots happened simultaneously. 1983 saw both Surrounded Islands and Scarface. In 1971, at the very beginning of this important and volatile period, city and county libraries joined forces and formed the Miami-Dade Public Library System. In 1972, the Decade of Progress Bond expanded it with thirteen new branches.

Assembling an Era celebrates MDPLS’s 40th anniversary, bringing together materials from the Library’s special and reference collections to document this fascinating time and build associations between its popular culture, Miami history, and library stories. The show tells these stories through works on paper by Miami artists, Purvis Young canvas banner pieces, books, newspaper articles, a snapshot timeline, a special installation of every 1971 reference volume in the Library’s collection, a slide installation by Kevin Arrow, a sound station, and more.

I am included in the “and more”.

[mdpls] zines @ the reading room

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Miami-Dade Public Library + zines + guests.

The Reading Room
A Temporary Space for Artists’ Books, Publications and Multiples
Friday, June 11, Noon – 2 p.m.
Miami-Dade Public Library System, Main Library Children’s Room, 101 W. Flagler Street, Miami

With special guests:
Cristina Favretto, Head of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries; founder of the Zine Collections at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University; Tasha Lopez de Victoria, artist, TM Sisters; Carol Todaro, artist, educator, bookmaker, printmaker; Ximena Izquierdo, artist, student, assistant director, University of Wynwood

With special feature:
A selection of zines from 1992-1996 from the collection of seminal zinestress Scapula Ray

Photo by Jenna Freedman, Barnard College Zine Library.
Photo by Jenna Freedman, Barnard College Zine Library.

On the second Friday of each month, a secret room in the Children’s Room at the Main Library becomes The Reading Room. Visitors can stop by any time between Noon and 2 p.m. to get up close and personal with selections from the Library’s collection of artists’ books, publications and multiples.

The theme of this month’s Reading Room is zines and obsolete technologies. There are many definitions for zines, but they tend to be do-it-yourself or independently produced and distributed publications. Often they are fueled by the personal expressions or obsessions of their creators. Some trace zines to fanzines, publications created by 1930s science fiction fans. Zine librarian Alycia Sellie writes, “Others believe that the medium was more influenced by the punk rock movement of the 1970’s. Many refer to the legacy of zines in the pamphlets and broadsides published as far back as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, or to the works of the Dada art movement.” In the 90s, zine culture thrived among women and girls as part of “the riot grrrl movement’s reaction to sexism in punk culture..and the rise of third wave feminism.”

Because zines are often created on Xerox machines, we’ll also be talking about the use of obsolete technologies in art and elsewhere. On special display this week is a selection of rare, early-mid 1990s punk/feminist photocopy zines from the collection of Oneco, FL-based zinestress Scapula Ray including Libel, Pawholes, Hey 19, Action Girl, and many others.

As always, there will be coffee and cookies. We may also talk about the World Cup.

For more information about exhibitions and programs at the Miami-Dade Public Library System, visit http://mdpls.org/news/exhibitions/exhibitions.asp

Reading Room @ MDPL

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Artists’ books, multiples and stuff at the Miami-Dade Public Library‘s Reading Room

Subject: TOMORROW: New Arrivals at The Reading Room, 12-2pm

The Reading Room
A Temporary Space for Artists’ Books, Publications and Multiples
Friday, May 14, Noon – 2 p.m.
Main Library Children’s Room, 101 W. Flagler Street, Miami
Featuring: New Arrivals Reading Session

This week we’ll take a break from special guest discussions to do some actual reading. The Reading Room will be stocked with 25 artists’ books, multiples and publications added to the Library’s permanent art collection this year. Many of them are heavy on text and demand closer inspection. The most recent batch includes vintage artists’ publications like Avalanche Magazine No. 4 – the Lawrence Weiner issue, from 1972; handmade objects such as Ellen Knudson’s Wild Girls Redux, which won the Florida Artist’s Book Award; zines by Özlem Altin; Black Noise: A Tribute to Steven Parrino, a box set of 32 artist’s books in comic book format, edited by John Armleder, Amy Granat, and Mai-Thu Perret; Nava Atlas’s Love and Marriage, an altered comic; and Poemas, a 1969 livre d’artiste with lithographs by Raoul Veroni and poems by Delmira Agustini, an early 20th century Uruguayan poet whose sensual work made her a trailblazer for later feminist poets.

So take advantage to stop by and read; normally you’d have to make an appointment to see these books and publications. As always, there will be coffee and cookies. There may be music.

On the second Friday of each month, a secret room in the Children’s Room at the Main Library becomes The Reading Room. Visitors can stop by any time between 12 and 2pm to get up close and personal with selections from the Library’s collection of artists’ books, publications and multiples.

Alan Lomax : Haiti

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The Alan Lomax Collection, which is part of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, is releasing a box set of music from 1930s Haiti.

Alan Lomax made an impressive career out of recording folk music all over the world; bringing it to American audiences, and preserving it for posterity. But few people heard the recordings that Lomax made in Haiti in the 1930’s. This month (Nov 17th) those Haiti recordings will be released to the public for the first time in the form of a 10-CD box set.

via http://www.theworld.org/2009/11/02/global-hit-alan-lomax/

NPR covered this story as well.

Hartre Recordings is actually releasing the box set. They offer a sample.

Afropop Worldwide has a review.

And Alan Lomax facebook page, maintained by the Association for Cultural Equity.

Girl who raised pigeons

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‘Girl who Raised Pigeons’ open tomorrow at Main Library.  We are all invited.

The Girl Who Raised Pigeons

October 9 – December 18, 2008

Main Library, Auditorium, 101 West Flagler Street, Miami – 305-375-2665

Reception and kick-off event for HEAL: A Place to Call Home

Thursday, October 9, 6 – 8:30p.m.

Gary L. Moore, Detail, Into the colors and sounds of the city’s morning, 2008, colored pencil on paper.

Courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition’s title comes from a short story with the same name by Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World. In the story, the relationship between a father and daughter, living in 1960’s Washington D.C., changes as a nearby railroad company buys up property and the neighborhood around them disappears. The story’s themes and images appear in the work: family, loss, displacement, community vigilance, changing landscapes. The show includes photography, drawing, and painting by Gary L. Moore, Kathleen Hudspeth, Ryan Holloway, Adler Guerrier, David Rohn, Vanessa Tomchik, Karla Turcios, Bayunga Kialeuka, and others. Curated by Library Curator Denise Delgado.

HEAL: A Place to Call Home in collaboration with Rhythmic Rapture

HEAL: A Place to Call Home is an arts-intervention program, initiated by arts group Rhythmic Rapture, which uses the arts to facilitate personal transformation for displaced and homeless populations.

The Library System has collaborated with Rhythmic Rapture to present the following series of programs to raise awareness and provoke discussion of the economic, health, cultural, and policy issues that contribute to homelessness and housing problems. The Girl Who Raised Pigeons is part of this program series.

Immigration and Home

A film screening is followed by a discussion of homelessness through the lens of immigration and the struggle to find work, housing, and community far from home.

Saturday, October 18, 1:00-3:00pm

Main Library, Auditorium, 101 West Flagler Street, Miami – 305-2665

The Economy of Home

Through a film screening and discussion, we take a look at how business, housing, and other economic factors contribute to homelessness.

Wednesday, November 19, 6:30 – 8:30pm

Miami Beach Regional, 227 22nd Street, Miami Beach – 305-535-4219

Homelessness and Mental Illness

A workshop in collaboration with the community artists of Rhythmic Rapture about the very real link between mental illness and homelessness.

Saturday, December 13, 2:00 – 4:00pm

Culmer/Overtown, 350 NW 13 Street, Miami – 305-579-5322

For more information about fall exhibitions and related programs at Main Library, check out http://mdpls.org/news/exhibitions/exhibitions.asp.

books and search

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There is a lot of talk about the Library Project of Google in collaboration with University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, and Oxford University. The Project will have Google digitize the holdings of the participating libraries and have the content searchable via print.google.com. Currently, books in the public domain can be browsed entirely. Other books are limited to a few pages and one is limited to how many books are avaliable and users are monitored. An authors’ guild have sued Google claiming copyright violation and would like for Google to ask every single copyright holder to give their consent. Some points to Fair Use should be sufficient to allow Google to proceed. Many logically concludes many more will be sold because links provided by Goggle’s Ad-Sense.
On the Media have piece(mp3) about this and Siva Vaidhyanathan argued that he would prefer the Library of Congress spearhead such a project on behalf of us all and not a behemoth of a company using proprietary methods. I totally agree. As much as I accept Google doesn’t intend to be evil but the biggest kid in the class is always feared. The French government feared the anglo-centric nature of the project so they will have their own program, featuring books written in french. And today, Yahoo and some others(including the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England) announced the Open Content Alliance which will similarly digitize library contents and make them searchable and downloadable, but the alliance will initially(my emphasis) provided contents from book in public domain.

I would like to see our local libraries invest in similar open projects for contents that are at least Florida specific.

Photography

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The NYTimes.com has an article on an exhibition of color phtographs, from the Depression Era, at the Library of Congress. The Print and Photographs Division of the LoC published ‘Bound for Glory‘, a book of photographs from which this exhibition is extracted. Most, 164,000, of the photos from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection are in black and white, but some, 1600, are in color. The color photographs’ artistic value seemed to have been in question. This issue is still present today in the criticism of photography. As far as color goes, I love the limited color palette of kodachrome. I would love shot some that film stock.
There is a slideshow on the NYTimes.

Marion Post Wolcott - Library of Congress
I really like this image. It reminds me of rural Haiti. The photgrapher is Marion Post Wolcott. A biography can be found here.
The library of the University of Miami has some pages, ‘for teachers and students’, about of the FSA-OWI photographs in Florida. Marion Post Wolcott consciously portrayed class difference in America. While in and around Miami, she photographed blacks, migrant workers, their living conditons and Miami Beach and its fancy offerings.

Marion Post Wolcott - Library of Congress
The rights of these images are administered by Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection.