Library Art

Learn about some of the art and the artists featured in the library

Celeste Beyers

Meet the artist for the Freedom to Breathe bus tour, which highlighted environmental inequality in America.

Bec Young

Soulstice is a work of art based on a Detroit climate march.

Jesse Purcell for the Poor People's Campaign

1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said "we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power," and organized a march for economic justice called the Poor People's Campaign. In 2017, William Barber II announced a revival of The Poor People's Campaign in honor of King's legacy.

Virginia Commonwealth University Sociology Professor Jesse Goldstein & Molly Fair

John Clare (1793-1864)

wrote this line in the poem to an insignificant flower obscurely blooming in a lonely wild. Romantic-era poet opposed to enclosure

What we do to the Mountain we do to ourselves

CHIP THOMAS with Raechel Running,

The Snowbowl Ski Resort in Flagstaff, AZ got permission from the National Forest Service to create snow from treated sewage water in an effort to save their resort.

Since the plan was proposed in 1998, members of thirteen native tribes living in the surrounding San Fransisco Peaks have fought to prevent waste water from desecrating their sacred mountain. The tribes failed to prevent the sewage snow, and now are working to prevent expansion of the resort.

Tear Down the Walls! Build Up the People!

CHIP THOMAS &THEA GAHR

2018, screenprint based on the 2017 border meeting

Chip Thomas & Thea Gahr

Bayard Rustin

Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation - to take power from those who misuse it, at which point they can become human too "

Bayard Rustin, 1964

civil rights, gay rights, non-violence advocate. Advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Roger Peet

"The need for solidarity is one of the most fundamental- it’s how we will get to the better future we imagine. If we fight together, we fight to win."

SCIENCE MARCH – GINA KIEL

Designed for the March for Science on Earth Day 2017 in Washington, D.C.

Ernesto Yerena

This work is "based off of the poverty, violence, and oppression the Lakota people face in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, also referred to as Prisoner of War Camp #334" and demands the United States stop violating constitutional treaties with indigenous groups.