Institute Library Takes Long, Strange Trip

The first sign that you’re heading somewhere when you walk into the Institute Library might be the cluster of oars hanging from each skylight, seemingly floating in space. The oars have souvenirs from the trips they’ve taken. A map of a river mouth. Fishing lures. Abstract designs. A ribbon that reads ​“invasive spirits.”

We’re being encouraged to travel ourselves. We’re also being encouraged to think about it.

The oars, by artist Scott Schuldt, are part of the Institute Library’s latest art exhibit, ​“Wish You Were Here: Journals, Journeys, and Expeditions,” curated by Martha Willette Lewis and featuring work by Fran Antmann, Leila Daw, Ed Dionne, Roberta Friedman, David Guy, James Lancel McElhinny, Isabella Mellado, Maryann Ott, Abigail Reynolds, Rob Rocke, and Lisa Seidenberg, in addition to Schuldt. The exhibit, which runs through Aug. 31, takes travel as its theme. Travel, as Lewis pointed out, can be simply for vacation and relaxation. It can be a feast for the senses, a way to learn a lot about some part of the world in a very short time. And, if done poorly, it can smell a lot like exploitation, a vestige of colonialism.

“Right now, we’re at a moment where tourism,” as a word, ​“is a negative thing,” Lewis said. She recalled a trip to India she took that forced her to confront both the opportunities and pitfalls of being a tourist. ​“It’s not easy to travel in India, even as a privileged Westerner,” she said. ​“Every day I would see things that were incredibly beautiful and incredibly horrible.”

Also, she added, ​“there’s no way to blend in. You either have to embrace being a tourist — or not.”

The double-edged sword of travel is fully sharpened in the pieces by Leila Daw that Lewis has incorporated seamlessly into the second floor of the Institute Library. In Taking Away, Daw portrays the tapestry of fertile farmland and waterways of the Burmese countryside, and then, surreally and terrifyingly, shows two hands wrapping the rivers around its forearms and giving a solid pull, rendering arid the land beneath them. It’s a simple, effective gesture that has a lot to say in several directions. Whose hands are they? Are they a farmer’s hands, depleting the landscape in a case of overfarming? Are they the hands of a colonialist — or a repressive government — interested in farmers only for purposes of exploitation? Are they a tourist’s hands, warping the landscape in the name of having an exotic experience? Are they the artist’s hands, diving into all these questions with clear eyes and mixed feelings?

The exhibit continues — and expands — on the library’s third floor. One of the largest pieces is a quilt of beadwork that also looks a lot like a map, which it is. Schuldt’s 39ST30 is an archeological site reproduced in beadwork, the product of a trip to South Dakota.

“When they dammed the Missouri River, the Smithsonian did river basin surveys” first, Schuldt said, quickly investigating and drawing up maps of the remnants of settlements before they were flooded by the impending reservoir. ​“Destroying an archeological site is like burning a library,” Schuldt. The Smithsonian’s work revealed that the most recent village, itself already vanished, had been built on top of a much older previous village. Who were the residents?

We’ll never really know. ​“By the time Lewis and Clark came up in 1804, all of South Dakota and Nebraska had been abandoned. It was all smallpox.”

Schuldt was a mechanical engineer at Boeing for 20 years; his forays into art were ​“self-taught and accidental. I was teaching myself to do beadwork and the work got bigger and bigger,” he said. ​“I’m learning it by looking at Native American work, because that’s what you have in the United States.”

Though he felt uncomfortable adopting Native American designs specifically. It felt too much like cooptation. So he developed his designs out of maps of archeological sites, which for a time he took part in excavating and exploring. ​“That’s my safe distance,” he said. ​“I have to step back and deal with it from the outside.”

Why beadwork? ​“The main thing,” Schuldt said, ​“is that it slowed me down. I could never get ahead of my thought process. It gave it time to reflect on what I was looking at.”

When the subject is a portrait, as it sometimes is, ​“you’ll be beading someone’s face and just spending time with them. She stares at you for a month and eventually starts talking to you. As an engineer, it kind of blindsides you.”

Balancing Schuldt’s deep dig are pieces in the exhibit that revel in the sensory overload that an intense travel experience can be. Roberta Friedman’s journals are jammed with details and images. Their execution as well as their content suggest both the volumes of information and insight that Friedman absorbed in her trip, as well as her awareness that any trip is ultimately still just skimming the surface.

Maryann Ott’s travel journals, meanwhile, suggest another way to travel that avoids some of the pitfalls of crummy tourism: traveling with a mission. In her case, that mission is astronomical phenomena, from eclipses in Iceland and Niger to the Transit of Venus in Egypt. It’s globetrotting from glaciers to deserts with a purpose.

And Ed Dionne’s journals are a reminder that travel can simply be fun. His Out West gives only the barest sense of where Dionne went specifically or what he did while he was there, but offers a vivid illustration of his interior thoughts while he was traveling, the ways his experiences sparked his own imagination.

As curator, Lewis is both playful and serious in including travelogues from decades ago, pulled from the Institute Library’s idiosyncratic collection. Modern viewers are allowed a moment to cringe and feel superior at titles like Brown Women and White and Fugitive in the Jungle. But Lewis also shows that some past travelers but our more cautious present in perspective, as in Vagabonding at Fifty, detailing a trip two women, Helen Calista Wilson and Elsie Reed Mitchell, took together across Central Asia and Russia decades ago.

Lisa Siedenberg’s Letter from Mom splits the difference, with hilarious and heartfelt results. The video is of stock footage of white travelers in what looks like southern Spain and North Africa a few generations ago. The soundtrack is Dave Brubeck’s ​“Take Five” played in a more Eastern mode. As the video progressed, the viewer is treated to text from a letter Siedenberg got her from her mother while her mother was traveling across southern Spain and North Africa. An account of a rich, life-changing experience, the letter is not. Instead, it’s a litany of travel snafus and mishaps, of confused logistics and crossed wires, which even happen to an experienced traveler like Siendenberg’s mother. ​“We took the ferry back and drove to Cadiz. But we left because we could not find hotel rooms,” we learn. ​“We left Aunt Florence in Granada.”

It’s a good reminder that travel can sometimes feel like a job. But it’s worth it to see the Alhambra at least once. And then to come back to where you live, eyes reopened to see everything like it’s new again.