Dust Jacket Weavings, 2024
Dust Jackets responds to the history of the Ethnic and Gender Studies Collections (EGSC) at University of California Santa Barbara’s Library.
In 2023, I was invited to participate in a pilot program where I was paired with the UCSB Library as an artist-strategist. Over the past year, I have built relationships with library staff, led workshops with students that engaged with archive materials, and researched in UCSB’s Special Collections.
During my most recent visit to the Ethnic and Gender Studies Collection at the UCSB Library, I was given access to two long-abandoned office spaces that were once inhabited by the Black Studies and Chicano Studies Library Assistants. When I entered the vacant offices, I encountered file cabinets full of ephemera related to the former staff’s jobs, including dozens of dust jackets, which libraries remove from hardcover books during intake processing and discard.
When I interviewed the former longtime Black Studies Library Assistant Alyce Harris, I learned that she and the Chicano Studies Library Assistant used the dust jackets in educational and artistic displays in the library. She said that their bright colors and patterns were an effective way to draw students in to view the rotating displays she made on BIPOC history and culture; displays that she says would often lead to conversations, which led to ongoing relationships with students, which in some cases led to lifelong intergenerational friendships.
Each work in this series interweaves two of the original dust jackets from the UCSB Library.
