Placed along the walls and crevices of San José State’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, visitors can find various art pieces on each of its eight floors.
“Recolecciones” is the library’s public art collection and was established when the library opened its doors over 20 years ago.
The collection’s lead artist, Mel Chin, produces art that combines culture and complex ideas, and addresses political and ecological issues, according to the library’s website.
Haun Saussy, University Professor at the University of Chicago, also collaborated in the collaboration along with Robert K. Batchelor, Director of Digital Humanities at Georgia Southern University.
Saussy said he as an 11-year-old boy in 1971 when Chin was in college. Chin was invited by the San José Public Art Program to submit a project for the library’s 2003 opening.
“I think we spent three or four days without sleeping — just sketching and outlining and laughing with our friends,” Saussy said in an email.
Saussy said the collection as a whole and its individual pieces are related to the library and the city that sponsors it. “Recolecciones” means both recollections, like memories, and “harvests” in Spanish.
“We envisaged the whole library as a kind of initiatory path through San Jose’s history . . . using the library collections to stimulate the invention of objects that would be in dialogue with the space and its users,” Saussy said.
Saussy said Chin’s intended purpose was to create “a community of the curious” and to speak to that kid who wonders why things are the way they are.
“To put labels on the artworks would have taken away the element of surprise so we hid them all over the library and there are a few that aren’t on the official leaflet,” Saussy said. “What they have in common is left up to the imagination.”
Dylan Mueller, who uses they/them pronouns, is a SJSU english senior and a library front desk attendant, said their favorite piece in the collection is the “Owl of Minerva” on the seventh floor.
“It's hidden in the little alcove in the wall,” Mueller said. “Most of the time you'll miss it, but I see it a lot while actually just sorting the books.”
Mueller said the library’s rotating display on the second floor changes a few times a year and the fifth floor often has cultural art displays. They said they love to see creative aspects added to the library as a writer.
“While I don't necessarily do the sort of art that you would see in a gallery or murals on walls and stuff, it feels human,” Mueller said. “It gives us something to connect to a place.”
Robert Batchelor said Saussy introduced him to meet Chin at University of California, Los Angeles.
Batchelor said he has experience creating experimental documentaries and installations with his wife, Sari Gilbert.
The “Recolecciones” team collaborated with Stanford University's Humanities Lab and Xerox PARC.
PARC, formerly known as Xerox PARC, stands for Palo Alto Research Center according to their website.
“The lab mostly worked with us on the Rosetta Stone piece at the top of the escalator,” Batchelor said in an email. “ (They) inspired me to build my own humanities computing lab in Georgia . . . so they were really influential experiences and defined how I came to think about the digital humanities.”
Mary Rubin and artist James Millar also worked with the team.
Batchelor said Chin liked to have art collaborations, but most of the fabrication was done by Chin or people from his workshop, like Barron Brown who drove the pieces across the U.S.
Batchelor said Chin’s studio was a beautiful old monastery with a massive stone barn in the hills near Asheville, North Carolina, a great place for fabricating big pieces. He also had access to mills to work on pieces like “Babel”. Inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel”, two parallel walls are covered by elaborate frames inset with mirrors on the lower level of the library, making “Babel”.
Saussy said researchers on the project went to the city archives and dug up information about riots, parades, ethnic conflict, parasites endangering the vineyards, reports of the coming of electricity to the city and issues over land and water.
“I love to think that nothing is truly forgotten and spending time in the archives looking for stories and images confirms that idea,” Saussy said.
Batchelor said when they were designing the pieces, they kept in mind the library is meant to last at least 50 years and probably many more. To account for the changing audience, they did a few digital pieces but mostly analog durability.
He also said he probably learned the most about John Steinbeck, an American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939) according to Brittanica, through his research.
“For Steinbeck's fissure, I actually took a film and sound crew and traveled the route of the Joad's backwards to Oklahoma (where Batchelor was born), collecting soil samples, artifacts and interviews along the way,” Batchelor said.
He said “The Lowrider Table” was the most controversial because the groups they worked with, which were publishers of lowrider magazines in San José and members of Chicano Studies on the faculty, did not see eye-to-eye at the time about how to portray the Latinx population of San José.
“ ‘True and Through’ is made of wood from a dawn redwood tree that had to be cut down from where the pillar stands now so it is a memory of the building,” said. “We went through the old MLK library and tried to save aspects of it.”.
Saussy said there were so many pieces the team designed but didn’t end up making, and would be up for round two if funding and inspiration comes along.
He said on the lowest floor is a stuffed bird chair that represents a canary in the “coal mine” of the stacks. In states where politicians ban books that contain challenging content, he said we’re all in trouble.
“Libraries are the canary in the coal mine,” Saussy said. I hope the San Jose library lasts a long time as an icon of community and discovery, like the canary that, as long as it sings, tells the miners the air is good to breathe.”
