July 1-31, 2016
Kate Atherton celebrates the library’s centennial by exploring the last 100 years of literature.
In this ink painted and cut out living wallpaper exhibit Illustrator Kate Atherton celebrates the library’s centennial by exploring the last 100 years of literature. The work is an abstract timeline highlighting a story or stories from one of the best selling books every ten years since 1916, the year Cleveland Heights Public Library was founded.
From 1916’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce to 2006’s Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, from a memoir written directly after World War II like The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman to classic children’s literature like 1926’s Winnie the Pooh and 1936’s Ferdinand the Bull the world of literature has been gifted amazing stories and our library has, in turn, given them to the public.
The purpose of this exhibit is to draw the “reader” in to the world of memories and language that books evoke. Using no words to transport viewers of the exhibit into these stories and, thus, into the history of this library – what people may have been reading on the pages of books every ten years for one hundred years now. This display is to pay homage to the heart of books in the hearts of Cleveland Heights for one hundred years through illustration.
