Art In Libraries
Over the last years in New York, the Robin Hood Foundation and city’s schools administration have constructed art libraries in 62 schools. Some of the libraries and those recently created at three schools in the Bronx have also appear with the addition of art works by well-known artists. In the picture, left, an art work at P.S. 47 by the illustrator Maira Kalman.
“I go to museums all over the world, and I love natural-history displays, and I wanted something that felt like that,†said Ms. Kalman
Another view of the installation, which Ms. Kalman said was intended to conjure the kind of eccentric personal museums that amateur scientists and collectors once built as a means of cataloging the world.
Some of the objects in the installation include a lump of unformed glass, a giant 1,000-watt light bulb and a fake coconut cake with a cherry on top. The library at P.S. 47 was designed by the architect Richard H. Lewis.
This library is called P.S. 96, and the design firm Pentagram helped find artists willing to donate time and resources to create outsize pieces that ring the rooms.
At P.S. 69, Christoph Niemann has designed a mural that uses images of books serving as almost everything — as Abraham Lincoln’s beard and Mona Lisa’s smile, as a car hood, an eagle’s wings and a dinosaur’s teeth — all organized with Dewey Decimal System numbers in painted bubbles.
