The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Public Art Collection“Recolecciones” is Spanish for “recollections” —as in memories. It also means “harvests” or “gatherings.”
The Latin root, “lect,” means both “to read” and “to gather.”
The ancient Romans envisioned reading
as a process of gathering up scattered
bits of information and combining theminto meaningful sequences.
Readers are thus gatherers and harvesters.
The library is a place where people come together
to recall and reformulate their common heritage,a place for “re-col-lect-ion.”

As part of the City’s ongoing commitment to the arts, the San José Public Art
Program commissioned artist Mel Chin to create an artwork for the new Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Library. Mel Chin’s approach was a non-traditional one, creating
34 artworks, sited throughout the library, designed to pay homage to the Library’s
collections. These artworks are to provoke your interest and curiosity, encouraging
exploration and circulation throughout the Library. All of the artworks are sited tosurprise you and add to your sense of mystery and wonder. They are site-speciﬁc;their adjacencies to the collections add context and additional layers of meaning.

The artworks vary from large and dramatic statements to intimate and subtle
insertions that may require numerous visits to discover. Recolecciones includes
functional installations such as chairs, tables and shelves, as well as wall paneling,
sculptural ceilings, curious light projections, and more traditional sculpture. Someof the concepts are invested with a sense of humor and quick wit, while others aredesigned for contemplation.

It is the hope of all involved in the creation of these artworks that they provide
additional meaning to your library visits.

Artist TeamMel Chin is an internationally recognized artist, known for creating works in a
broad range of media and scale, including objects, temporary installations andpermanent public artworks. Since the 1970s, he has produced artworks that joincross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas including political and ecologicalissues. Mel Chin’s artistic process is highly collaborative in nature; his collaborators
have included biologists, psychologists, geologists, medical doctors and television
producers.

Mel Chin’s chief collaborators on Recolecciones were Haun Saussy, Bird White
Housum Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University; Robert Batchelor,
Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University; and artist James Millar.

Mel Chin’s methodology also involved an extensive process of community
consultation and participation. Through numerous community forums throughout
San José, Mel Chin facilitated discussions on a wide spectrum of personal andcivic issues that served to inspire the artwork concepts. These discussions involved
participants from a diverse range of race, age and socio-economic backgrounds who
voiced multiple points of view. In some cases, artworks are the implementation ofcreative concepts delivered by talented students of San José State University andthe Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Public Art Collection

Canary Couch
A canary-yellow reading chair, an overstuffed vinyl-clad version of “Tweety
Bird™,” situated amid the stacks on this subterranean level, references
San José’s mining history where fragile caged mineshaft canaries wereused to warn miners of unhealthy air. Canary Couch becomes a metaphor
for the role of libraries as cultural institutions whose health and vigor
testiﬁes to the well-being of the societies that support them.

Babel
Inspired by Pieter Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, two parallel walls in the Government Periodicals andMicroﬁlm Section are covered by elaborate frames inset with mirrors, reinforcing the theme of inﬁnite
reproduction; a meditation on the monumental and reﬂective nature of language.

LOWER LEVELE Elevators and stairs

True and ThroughA magniﬁcent redwood tree was removed toaccommodate construction of the new Librarybuilding. The tree was hauled cross-country,
milled by the artists into veneer, and returned
to clad a continuous column within thebuilding. The reconstructed trunk begins on theLower Level and reaches to the Eighth Floor.

Fiction/Fiction
As in many great mystery novels, theBrandenburg Browsing Area contains a secretrotating bookcase. One side of the shelf is
stocked with faux mystery books, the otherwith current popular-ﬁction titles.

FIRST FLOOR

Entrance

et

tre

S
rth

Fou

Entrance

Counter

Tree of Light

A digital reader mounted on a wall adjacent to the checkout
counter displays a real-time record of the total number ofbooks checked out system-wide since the opening of theDr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in August 2003.

A light ﬁxture above the Children’s Story Telling Area
alludes to a 19th century diagram of the Sephirotic
Tree, a symbolic Arabic and Jewish mapping of theconnections of life, language and belief.

E
Entrance

Escalators

Oasis
Desert watering holes are sites where stories have been exchanged for millennia.
The nomadic tribes who traversed these desert lands have inspired many of our
fairy tales. In homage to nomadic storytellers, the carpet and furniture designs in
the Children’s Area were developed jointly by the artists and architects on the basisof traditional geometric patterns and colors of tribal weavings.

Attic

Round-Up

The ancient art of memory (“ars memoriae”)
technique calls for the building of an imaginary“memory palace” with multiple rooms to store one’s
thoughts. The ceiling of a lecture room randomly
morphs into models of famous domes and vaults
from historical architecture including: Hagia Sophia(Ayosofya), the Pantheon, Chartres Cathedral, aNative American long house, a Mayan temple, a
traditional pagoda, and the Sydney Opera House.

Eighty-one leather chairs, eachmarked with one of the forty-threecattle brands of the original San
José ranchos (as recorded in 1819),“range” freely on the 2nd ﬂoor.

SECOND FLOORHearthE

Rosetta
The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799. Its
trilingual inscription, which made it possible todecipher hieroglyphics, represents the mutual
intelligibility of diverse languages. Rosetta’s glass
face is permanently etched with the inscription
from the original Rosetta Stone. Appearing frombehind the glass are ﬂeeting digital messages,
including an anthology of multi-lingual writingfrom orabout San José, abulletin board forlibrary-related publicannouncements,and hexagramsfrom the Chineseclassic, Book of
Changes.

Raza Writers
The transformation and personalization of massproduced cars parallels the process of reading,promoting transformation, personal movement
and creativity. East Side Story is a chopped down
bicycle supporting a table detailed with stories
of San José’s east side. The ’48 Chevy Fleetline
is a table activated with electric lifts. Table of
Milagros incorporates thousands of Latin American
traditional charms. The designs, selected throughan area-wide competition and fabricated locally,celebrate creative local enterprise.

A ﬁreless cornerﬁreplace is fabricatedfrom book-shaped
cast bricks andmarble speciﬁcallyselected for its smoky
tendrils. This artwork
alludes to the historyof book burning.

Self-Help
Mirrors
Mirrors mounted
behind the books in
the Self-Help Section give us another perspective withwhich to reﬂect on ourselves — if we care or dare to.

THIRD FLOOR
VesselPage Passage
As library patrons walk between two rows of the bookstacks, they trigger sounds of pages turning, followed at
the end of the corridor by the sound of a book closing.
Books contain “passages;” the reading of a book canalso be a passage to a new way of seeing the world.

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Audio experience

FOURTH FLOOR
Steinbeck’s Fissure
A diorama at ankle height is located within a wall surrounding
the Steinbeck Collection. Steinbeck described the process ofrediscovery as follows: “A young, inquisitive and original man
might one morning ﬁnd a ﬁssure in the traditional techniqueof thinking. Through this ﬁssure he might look out and ﬁnd a
new external world about him.” The ﬁssure contains soil andartifacts from the Oklahoma-to-California migration outlined in
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

A vessel formed in the
shape of the redoubled
proﬁle of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., emanates
the colors of skin tones
representing the ethnic
composition of the citizensof San José. This vessel,
located adjacent to the
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Collection, is ﬁlled withthe symbolic “content ofour [collective] character.”

Migration
The path ofMigration begins withthe ascension of thousandsEof brillantly colored cast metal
Monarch butterﬂies along the brilliant blue wallof the South East stairwell. The butterﬂies escape thestairwell and migrate toward the book stacks resting on theceiling. Their destination is not arbitrary, but marks the location ofsigniﬁcant books by Latin American authors of various disciplines. Migration
acknowledges the contributions of these authors and further reinforces the concept of“circulation” — both of books and knowledge — as a major goal of the Library.

FIFTH FLOOR

Golden Gate

Skeptacle
If a skep is a beehive made of straw, and a spectacle issomething to behold, and being skeptical is advisable inthis complicated world, then Skeptacle, is a giant bookcase
for the thesis volumes produced by generations of San José
State University students. Skeptacle honors the boundlessinvestigation of the thesis authors, and their industrious,
creative andintellectual
productivity.

E

Beethoven’s Inner Ear
A brass-plated, perforated,
sculptural representation of an
inner ear, approximately the sizeof a French horn, replaces thegrill of a public-address speakerin the ceiling of the Music
Section. “The most perfect music is soundless,”said the Taoist philosopher Lao-Tzu. Beethoven’s
compositions produced after the onset of his
deafness are the result of an inner, intellectual
hearing, and are considered by many to be hismost far-reaching and exploratory work.

The gateway to the Special Collections displays 88 golden
carburetors, the construction of which recalls the towers of theGolden Gate Bridge,
an emblem of theutopian hopes
and dreams of
California, and apart of the state’s
highway culture. The
carburetors also
recall the ranks ofbodhisattva images
in Buddhist shrines,
suggesting thesacred and inﬁnitely
elusive qualityof such utopian
dreams. The embraceof the car as acultural icon contributes
to making California
Father Magin’s Pillow
what it is today.
One of the founders of the Santa Clara Franciscan Monastery,
Father Magin Català is said to have foreseen the coming of theAnglo-Americans, the railroad, the discovery of gold and the 1906
earthquake and ﬁre, in dreams that came
while he slept on his adobe pillow. This chairsized pillow, fabricated from adobe with ﬂakes
of gold, straw particles, and ash, alludes tothose dreamlike prognostications of history.

AR TWORK DESCRIPTIONS CONTINUED ON THE OTHER SIDE© 2007 City of San Jose, Ofﬁce of Cultural Affairs
www.sanjoseculture.org

A R T W ORK DE SCRIP TI O N S C O N TI N U ED

Archeology TableE

Aesop’s fox disparaged the grapes he was unable to reach sayingthat they were sour. Sprouting from the ceiling in the Business and Economics
Section, this twisted and tortured wrought-iron vine is laden with sour green
fruit. The sculpture can be interpreted as a sly comment on the early agricultural
economy of San José, the data-harvesting economy
that has replaced it, and deals gone awry.

Sour Grapes

The design of this hand-hammered brass gong references the San
José scale, a parasite that nearly destroyed the fruit orchards of
the Santa Clara Valley in the 1880s. Chinese laborers, blamed
for this pestilence, led one of America’s ﬁrst labor revolts. Below
the gong, behind glass, is a mallet with a head of embroideredsilk; the pattern and color based on the Asian ladybug, the scale’s
natural predator. This commemorationof past dangers, natural remedies,
persecutions, and call to activism,
is located adjacent to the Laborand Immigration Sections.

Honoring a desire expressedby the San José State
University English Department
to immortalize the Bard, theartists designed a mechanized“constellation” based on
Shakespeare’s portrait thatprojects across a wall adjacent to a collection of his works.
The image appears brieﬂy and randomly once each day.
Shakespeare’s lit visage will not escape Brutus’ comments
in Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 1: “The exhalations whizzingin the air give so much light that I may read by them.”

E

The glass windows on the bridge located near the Art and Art
History Section appear cracked. On closer scrutiny, the cracks
match those in Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bareby Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). Closer inspection
reveals the lines as jokes and puns, sand-blasted into thesurface of the glass. Duchamp shattered art-making tradition,using puns, irony and complicated layering to emphasize theconceptual over the retinal.

A carved volcanic stone table,
alluding to Olmec sculpture, is placed
among thestandard
librarytables in
the vicinityof theArchaeology
Collection.

SIXTH FLOOR
Gong & Scale

Hatch

A little door surrounded by an ornate façade is located at the base of the wall of the southernmost elevator. Easily
noticed by children, it evokes an Alice in Wonderland potential of going down (and up) the rabbit hole into anotherworld. The artwork suggests a dialogue between the construction of imaginary spaces by author Lewis Carroll andof built spaces by famous architect Louis Sullivan. As Carroll animated the movement of childhood imagination,
Sullivan necessitated the elevator with his skyscrapers.

SEVENTH FLOOR

English Lit

Wise Cracks

Owl of Minerva

The grill covers of the building’s ventilation
system have been clad with a sculptured
surface pattern derived from stomata, thebreathing apparatus of the respiration
pores on plant leaves.

Vermin Miller Chairs

A mutation of the standard library chairs with two
additional legs, this artwork references the insect world
and is located near the Natural Science Section.

EIGHTH FLOOR

Reflecting Pools

Creating a commentary on
water usage and industrial
erosion, one of the threesinks within each of the
men’s and women’sbathrooms is sculpturally
eroded, progressing from theEighth to the Third Floor.

The nineteenth-century idealist
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel
noted, “the owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with thefalling of the dusk,” meaningthat philosophy comes tounderstand a way of life just as it passes away. Hegel hadin mind the transition from eighteenth-century feudalism tonineteenth-century commercialism and democracy. A carvingof a great horned owl perched within a darkened niche waits
to take ﬂight over the Philosophy and Psychology Sections.

In and Out

Tectonic Tables

These ﬁve functional reading tables, located adjacent to the
Geology Section, map the shape of the Gondwanaland. The
granite of each table was quarried
from the continent it recalls. The
tables are on casters, referring to
the tectonic activity of the Earth’s
surface, ever evident in California.

E

Zeno’s Books

Underground Books

Beneath certain book stacks throughout the Library lie underground “vaults”
holding books that historically have been banned, burned or intentionally set aside.
Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter lie buried beneath the Mystery and Science Fiction
Sections. Galileo is represented beneath Science. Candide can be uncovered in Folio
Art and Ulysses in British Literature. More vaults are to be found in amongst the bookcollections in: Art, Old World History, Mathematics, International Languages, Business,
Law, Literature, Asian Literature, Technology and Control Systems, and Decorative Arts.

This artwork is composed of white leather-bound books inserted
among the Mathematics collection. Zeno of Elea, in the 6th
century B.C., argued that motion was impossible. He
reasoned that since the space between any two
points can be inﬁnitely subdivided (halved, thenhalved again, and then halved again, and so on)
no moving object could ever reach its goal. This
series of books, shrinking progressively, visually
manifests Zeno’s mathematical construction.

F O R A D D I T I O N A L I N F O RMAT I O N O N T H E A R T W O RK , P LE A SE V I SI T W W W.S JL IBR AR Y.O R G / ML KAR T.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSARTIST Mel Chin
CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT Mel Chin, Haun Saussy, Bob Batchelor, and James Millar
Other contributors to the conceptualizations of the artworks include over 100 San José community members:
San José City and University librarians; students of San José State University and Cooper Union School of Art.
San José State University Team: Wendy Angel, Ed Clapp, Francesca Davis, Russell Fan, Carolyn Gerstman,
Janet Kang, David Kempkin, Rachel Lazo, Sheila Malone, Masako Miki, Inna Razumova, Rob Spain, Scott
Trimball, John Zimmerman, Minging Zhou
Cooper Union School of Art Team: Amelia Bauer, Alejandro Cardenas, Robert de Saint Phalle, Jorge Elbrecht,
Nina Gallant, Aimee Genell, Francis Kerrigan, Sam Kusack, Alexander Monachino, Sarah Morgan, Michael
Vahrenwald, Allyson Vieira, Donald Tobias Wong
FABRICATION/INSTALLATION MANAGEMENT TEAM Barron Brown – Lead Fabricator and Project Manager,
Helen Nagge – Ofﬁce Management, Jamie Streichler – Bookkeeping
CORE FABRICATION TEAM Barron Brown, Curtis Allen, Jim Whitehurst, Jerry Murphy
SAN JOSE FABRICATION/INSTALLATION MANAGEMENT Mary Rubin -- City of San José Public Art Program
Project Manager; Dolores Montenegro -- San José Redevelopment Agency Project Manager; Kevin Krumdieck,
Dawn Zimmer, Jeanne Rawlings and Bill Bocken -- Carrier Johnson Architects; Trish Heine, Jim Klingensmith,
Brendan Bartolo -- Gilbane Building Company, Construction Management

Rodriguez, Sam Rodriguez, and Huong Nguyen – East Side Story

ADDITIONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mary Park Johnson

ZENO’S BOOKS

Charisse Antonopolous
Lenehan Architectural
Glass
Wayne Shoemaker
Joke Contribution:
Bonnie Blacklaw, Maria
Brand, Linda Dydo,
Fred Greenhut, Cambria
Grifﬁn, Mike Hyllested,
Shelley Lindgren,
Lenette Pedregon, Ned
Himmel, Linda Gaskell,
Mignon Gibson, Michelle
Philibosian, Stewart
Sandra, Eugene Sakai,
Michael Sarhad, Betsy
Smullen,Elise Tavella,
UC Berkeley Folklore
Archives, Donna Ward,
Nan Welch, Karen
Williams, Victor Zaballa

WISE CRACKSSteve Durie
Bob Taylor

VESSEL

Bernhardt Furniture

VERMIN MILLER CHAIRS

Concept: Biblioteca
Latinoamericana
Community

UNDERGROUND BOOKS

Concept: Robert deSaint Phalle
Charisse Antonopolous
Bildon Inc.
Dave Murray
June Murray
Erath Veneer

TRUE AND THROUGH

Helix ElectricDavid Murray

TREE OF LIGHTRAZA WRITERS ARTISTS Jeanne Jabbour – Table of Milagros; Abraham Ortega – ’48 Fleetline; Matthew

ARCHAEOLOGY TABLE

Keith Grenoble
Wayne Shoemaker

ATTIC

Asheville Thermaform
Olé SorensonBABELOWL OF MINERVA

Concept: Russell Fan
Memorial Design
Joe Vogler

TECTONIC TABLES

Bob Batchelor

STEINBECK’S FISSURE

Concept: 7/22/99
Community MeetingDavid Wilson

SOUR GRAPES

Charisse Antonopolous
David Murray
Milford Bookbinding, Inc.
Peter Wilson

SKEPTACLE

Roger Besenti
Blue Ridge GlassSELF HELP MIRRORS

Charisse Antonopolous
Laser Precision

ROUND UP

Jason Escalante
Melissa Catherine Leavitt
Lenehan Architectural
Glass
Allen Beye Riddell
Aaron Russell
Haun Saussy
Jeffrey Schnapp
Wayne Shoemaker

ROSETTA

A.R.T. Research
Just Manufacturing, Co.
Wayne Powell

IN AND OUT
Table of Milagros
Asheville Thermoform
Eric Clausen –Olé Sorenson
Metalworks,
Tim Englert – Carpentry,
MIGRATION
Lenehan Architectural
Carol Byers
Glass
Keith Grenoble
Pin Source
East Side Story
Claire Powell
Sam and Matthew
Rodriguez – Fabrication
OASIS
Carrier Johnson Architects REFLECTING POOLS

Gla$$ for Le$$
Keith Grenoble
June Murray
Shopbot, Inc.

James Millar
Brad Roth

PAGE PASSAGE

BEETHOVEN’S
INNER EARCharles Tucker

Concept: SJSU Student
Team
Bob Taylor

CANARY COUCH

Dickie Huffman
Fred Lochavitz

RAZA WRITERS

Concept: Alejandro
Cardenas‘48 Fleetline
Bill Wishart -- Fabrication
Management andInstruction, Kayvon
Shakeri -- Fabrication
Assistant, Nacho – Body
and Paint, Faith Bumper– Chrome, Lewis Delgado– Pin striping
Fabrication by FremontHigh School Advanced
Auto Tech Class Fall
2006: Spencer Cook,
Gene Davis, Josh De
Rush, Humberto Felex,
Ben Fontanilla, Binh
Hoang, Jon Magilulo,
Leonardo Morales, NickPeterson, Jorge Santana,
Eric Torres, Marcus
Przyborowski, Dustin
Prichard, Randale Wilson,
Frank Sowers, Megan
Gouvela, Kortney Highﬁll

COUNTER

Concept: Alejandro
Cardenas
Vorne Industries
Bob Taylor

ENGLISH LIT

Bob Taylor

FICTION/FICTION

Concept: Amelia Bauer
David Murray
June Murray

GOLDEN GATE

Concept: Mary Rubin
Roger Besenti
Buddy Edwards
Permastelisa

GONG & SCALE

Sylvia Archer
Karen Watkins

HATCH

Concept: Barron Brown
Alton Edwards
Laser Precision
Wayne Powell

HEARTH

Linda Larsen
Star Granite

JOINT LIBRARY PUBLIC ART MASTER PLAN Freeman Whitehurst GroupJOINT LIBRARY ARTIST SELECTION Mary Livingstone Beebe, Ann Chamberlain, Regina Cornwell,Gretchen Freeman, Robert Milnes, Jill Sebastian, Joel Slayton – Selection Panel; Brenda Brown – Selection
Coordination
RAZA WRITER ARTIST SELECTION Ann Chamberlain, Mel Chin, Julia Curry-Rodriguez, Frank Espinoza,
Jane Light, Jeff Paul, Alejandro Ramirez, Moses Salas – Selection Panel; Mary Rubin – Competition
Coordination
SPECIAL THANKS Harriet Traurig, Barbara Goldstein, Jane Light, Maribel Alvarez, Robert Bass,
Gunner Birkerts, Patricia Breivik, Cindy Chavez, Alan Decker, Bill Ekern, Fawna Ferguson, Art Heinrich,
Ruth Kifer, Sylvia Light, Bob McDermand, David Nieh, Lorraine Oback, Tung Pham, Bob Ruff, Sharon Russell,
Mary Somerville, Xerox Parc, Gordon Yusko, Jerry Allen, the San José City Council and Arts Commission for
their ongoing support, and the library docents who sustain the project.

GRAPHIC DESIGN: CDF graphics FLOOR PLANS: Courtesy of the San José Mercury News
PHOTOGRAPHY: Gregory Case Photography WEB DESIGN: Gorman Lai