Art Library Project
Location: Worth Ryder Art Gallery
116 Anthropology + Art Practice Building, UC Berkeley campus
Regular hours: Mon - Thurs, 12- 5pm, only during exhibitions
Currently closed during the pandemic but scheduled to reopen Fall 2021.
Free and Open to the Public
The Library collection is non-circulating. Come read with us in the gallery!
Created and staffed by Art Librarian Interns, as part of the Worth Ryder Gallery Internship Program
The Art Library Project serves the UC Berkeley campus community, art students, and gallery visitors by providing an accessible and expansive platform for art history, theory, racial, social, and cultural justice, literature, and research materials useful to artists. It is a community gathering space and a destination for reading and pleasure. The library is a place to learn about new artists and delve into contemporary art theory. We feature student-curated exhibitions of special collections and projects.
Anti-racist and anti-colonialist work is crucial to our mission. By adding books to the collection by artists and authors with BIPOC and other historically-marginalized identities, we include diverse perspectives that reflect our amazingly rich student community, and offer a more just vision for what art can accomplish. By challenging canonical art historical narratives, we hope to promote racial justice in the department and art world at large.
We are grateful to the artist group Related Tactics and Sming Sming Books for creating the Shelf Life Project, which we have implemented at the library, allowing us to see what voices are missing from our collection, and to acquire books that rectify ongoing historical injustices that are perpetuated through the biased process of collecting knowledge objects.
The Art Library Project is intended to be a community center that facilitates art research and encourages connections between students, faculty, and artists. It was created in response to the fact that the Art Practice Department did not have a public library. Despite the excellent UC Berkeley Art History/Classics Library (Doe Library, Room 308), there was a lack of an immediate, autonomous zone where students could gather in Art Practice spaces.
The Art Library Project is more than a collection of books about art – it reflects the way artists do their research. As such, the library features books on a wide ranging variety of topics, novels, fiction, comics, and zines. This encourages the kind of serendipitous, horizon-broadening discoveries that are one of the great pleasures of library spaces.
Note: The Art Library Project is NOT part of the UC Berkeley Library System, and is a non-circulating library staffed by student interns. However, copies of many (but not all) of our titles are available via OskiCat.
Made possible by a Creative Discovery Grant from UC Berkeley Arts + Design
Supported by UC Berkeley Art Practice Department.