The pieces at first look just like abstract collages, but soon, fragments of meaning emerge. The shape of lips. A pattern of shadows. Finally, letters and words, but not enough of them to know exactly what they say, and certainly not enough to know where they’re from. The meaning and the source have been cut away, and they’re now out of reach. The viewer has to look to the accompanying labels to learn anything. It turns out the piece on the left is taken from Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one on the right is from The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. King’s book was banned in South Africa during apartheid. The Bluest Eye had been banned from schools and libraries in the past few years in over 20 states — including Connecticut.
The obfuscuation in the image, and the revelation in the labels next to them, gets at the point of “De-Circulated: An Interpretation of Banned Books,” a series of artworks by Karen Duncan Pape along with a selection of “our favorite suppressed volumes,” running now at the upstairs gallery of the Institute Library through Sept. 8.
Pape started creating the series in response to the push in recent years from conservative groups to ban books in U.S. schools. “When I was growing up in a small town in rural Virginia, books were my lifeline. They introduced me to other countries, different political viewpoints, and notions of freedom and justice. The written words developed my mind’s eye — allowing me to envision a world beyond my small town,” Pape writes in an accompanying statement.
Throughout history, books have been banned for a myriad of reasons, from subject matters to perceived political agendas to the identities of the authors. “Most books being banned today have Black or Brown protagonists or deal with the issues of racism, sexuality, or gender,” Pape writes. “Consequently, young people already struggling with identity and acceptable role models are being denied opportunities to expand their knowledge and strengthen their voices through books.”
“It is distressing that the alternate viewpoints which allowed me to develop an inquiring and critical mind are being eliminated for our youth today,” she adds.
That distress translates to the way Pape created the images. “For this series, I used multiple exposures and a series of blends to deconstruct and rearrange the covers of banned books. I obscured or eliminated text, just as the banning of books is eliminating the written word,” Pape writes. The labels, in turn, reveal just enough to let the viewer feel the sting of what’s been lost. The above two images, for instance, are taken from Elie Weisel’s Night (banned in schools and libraries in North Carolina in 2020 and in Texas in 2022) and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (banned in schools and libraries in half the states in the country, again including Connecticut, between 2021 and 2023).
Without detracting from the concerns in the art pieces, the rest of the exhibition dives into the history of banned books further — first pointing out slyly that a ban is a double-edged sword. For some readers (this reporter most definitely included), nothing makes them want to read a book more than learning that someone else has banned it. The Diary of Anne Frank, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Ulysses: all have, in the end, benefited from threats to their existence. There’s an additional thrill to The Master and Margarita knowing that Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov (first favored, then banned by Stalin) wrote his absurdist, eviscerating masterpiece, burned the manuscript, then rewrote it, then hid it in a drawer for decades, so it was published after his death. So the exhibition contains copies of banned books and loving notes to those books by the people who own them — including the above gorgeous pop-up version of Alice in Wonderland.
Hanging from the tall windows at the front of the room like drapes, however, are the antidotes to having too much optimism that the voices of the banned will all someday be heard. On four very long sheets of paper are printed the titles and authors of banned books, followed by abbreviations of the states they’ve been banned in.
The sheer volume of the list is enough to give pause. A brief glance at the titles gives a sense of the way books about Blackness, or queerness, or both, have recently been particularly targeted. Just as important is the fact that so few of the books are well-known. An international bestseller like Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera has little to fear from a school or library banning it. Most of the other books do. For every classic that emerged from oppressive obscurity, we’ll never know how many were lost, or how many we could be losing now.
“De-Circulated” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through Sept. 8. Visit the library’s website for hours and more information.