Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 5–7pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, November 1, 3–5pm
Dearest Reader,
My mother was born in 1912 in Redwood City, California. She raised me to understand how the world works, and books were always part of our life together. There’s a photo of me in 1938—two years old, sitting in my crib with a book—taken by my father with his Kodak Brownie. Books taught me to be okay with who I am and to care about other people’s struggles.
There are things I don’t like about today: the decline of penmanship, the decline of reading for pleasure, and the hysteria of banning books—many about real people’s lives and issues we should be talking about, not banning, burning, or stuffing in a closet. I’m uneasy with artificial intelligence pretending to be trustworthy, tossing out snippets with no context or responsibility. And I’m still stupefied by our government’s attack on knowledge, especially science.
So here you are, in a decommissioned phone booth, surrounded by book covers with their insides torn out. Local libraries pulled these from circulation and saved them for me to make things with. Think of them as proxies for the more than 10,000 instances of canceled books—affecting over 4,200 unique titles—in U.S. public schools during the 2023–24 school year. I lived through the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 1950s and wish the fear of others wasn’t happening all over again.
Behind you is a question for today, tomorrow, and the future of your children:
Whatever happened to knowledge?
Beatrice Hull
September 2025
