Edgar Arceneaux at WaNaWari

WaNaWari is a new cultural center in the Central District. Located at 911 24th avenue on the site of Inye Wokoma’s grandmother’s house, it is “Reclaiming Space for Black Art and Stories.” Four people are collaborating: Inye Wokoma and Elisheba Johnson are African American artists affected by gentrification and displacement . Jill Freidberg and Rachel Kessler, are white artists using art and stories to challenge white supremacy, especially as it is expressed through gentrification and displacement.

A week ago we gathered for a special event with Edgar Arceneaux, visiting artist from Los Angeles with a current exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery “Black Book of Lies” (until June 2 ). The exhibition is a space that looks from the outside like a wooden structure of hard to characterize design somewhere between slave cabin and space ship.

Inside is a labyrinth filled with books in various conditions.

As we wind through it, it is a tight space, a bit claustrophobic. You can barely pass between the shelves filled with many types of books: first of all are burnt scroll-like objects, a reference to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Then you run into your own reflection on a shiny surface. Whoops! are we intruders or destroyers or tourists or book lovers filled with horror? As we wind into the space (a labyrinth with a false ending, a center, and a way out) the books on the shelves change, first there are altered books on contemporary art, particularly the book Arte Povera, about contemporary Italian conceptual art, which lends itself easily to other sardonic titles ( I leave it to your imagination), Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence ( of Arabia) Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Lenin, Chaucer, Descartes, Bible stories, volumes of the Encylopedia Brittanica,. As we go deeper and deeper into the labyrinth we finally arrive at nine Bill Cosby books that have been stuck together unreadable, an indication of the huge issue with Bill Cosby today, cultural icon to disgraced predator. We are happy to find the exit.

At the workshop we were asked to make our own small models for libraries. Arceneaux spoke of how books can destroy or transform, how they can get thrown out, how they create layers in our lives. With a piece of brown cardboard, some colored paper, magazines to cut up, a few bits of plastic and other things, we were asked to imagine a library building.

The results were astonishing, all sorts of imaginative structures and each of us told a narrative as we briefly presented them.

I was pretty intimidated as I am a writer, not an artist, but Edgar was super helpful and encouraging. My library, which everyone immediately compared to the Guggenheim of course, rises up through rainbow colors to a culmination in nature with a flower at the top. We were asked to include a reference to a book we were given and to have at least 5 different categories, mine were fairly obvious, exercise, cooking, art, history, literature, myth, poetry and nature. Other people had wonderfully imaginative categories such as giants for example.

My culmination of the spiral in nature is both an homage to my father who was a naturalist, and my love of nature. That sounds like such a cliche, but it is more and more true for me as I am increasingly concerned about alienation from nature as we plug something in our ears and look at our phones all the time. I feel privileged to remember to listen to the free concert of birds (thanks to my birding friends) and enjoy eating fruit and vegetables from a bounteous garden behind our house that my husband has developed ( I am from New York City so knew nothing about soil, fertilizer, etc).

Edgar gave me the flower on the top. Thank you Edgar. Thank you WaNaWari.