Lori Brown's Matilda Joslyn Gage Library: A Reflection

Matilda Joslyn Gage

When an art show ventures outside the realm of aesthetics and into that of the concept— especially one extending its hand to a community saturated with visual art(ists)—people are bound to leave with some questions. But that’s the point.

(The Missing Library) could not be a more conceptual exhibit. A show built around community engagement and provoking discussion about the unstable future of libraries, its lack of pretty pictures throws some visitors at first. But then they return, with questions they didn’t know they had and a new understanding of how (The Missing Library) isn’t a show that requires, or wants, typical gallery decorum. It’s actually one that invites you to stretch out on a giant pillow and watch Ghostbusters, to play a scavenger hunt, to take out a book but leave another in its place; it wants you to leave your mark as it leaves one on you.

The events, pieces, and projects involved in (The Missing Library) aren’t what they appear to be at first glance. It’s like a book you actually want to read two or three times. You got the storyline the first time around but it brought up questions—equal parts vague and personal—about how you view the world that bring you back in search of your answer.

With that said, I watched and listened with an open mind three Thursdays ago as architect Lori Brown talked about her proposed Matilda Joslyn Gage Library and the eponymous woman whose legacy just reemerged on the historical radar for the first time in over a century.

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Annie Shaw, organizer of (The Missing Library), introduced the exhibition, the architect’s project, and their connective conceptual tissue: libraries. “Libraries are communal places,” explained Shaw. Places where information can be exchanged, formerly through books but today through other, less tangible means—read “digital.” As opposed to the typical public library, Lori’s project tackles what it is to create a unique communal space around the legacy of one person. Brown started with some background on Gage as a figure in politics and early feminism.

It turns out that Matilda Joslyn Gage, if history books didn’t lie fib, would have been right up there with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a leader in the Women’s Suffrage movement. The three women all lived in New York State: Gage settling in Fayetteville, outside of Syracuse, with the others in Seneca Falls and Rochester respectively. Unfortunately, Stanton’s husband was not fond of Gage’s “radical” views on women’s rights, religion, and American politics in general.

Apparently, Gage thought all people are born with the natural right to equality. She also thought the Christian Church’s role in early American society—or any for that matter—would be the downfall of said society. Gage saw Christianity’s involvement in laws and communities as counter to the separation of church and state Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War.  And it turns out this “radical” interpretation of the state of American society got Gage (literally) written out of the women’s rights movement and then out of American history in general.

At this point, Lori Brown flips the PowerPoint slide and my eyes and ears are open wide enough to fit a tractor-trailer. This new slide has a quote from the dedication page of Gage’s most famous book Women, Church, and State, released in 1893, censored in 1920, resurrected in 1980 by Sally Wagner, PhD.—the first in Women’s Studies.

And now that quote:

“This Book is…

Dedicated to all Christian women and men, of whatever creed or name who, bound by Church or State, have not dared to Think for Themselves:

Addressed to all Persons, who, breaking away from custom and the usage of ages, dare seek Truth for the sake of Truth. To all such it will be welcome; to all others, aggressive and educational.”

And that quote instantly reminded me of this one from John Milton’s Areopagitica:

“Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”

Milton gave his famous speech against censorship over two and a half centuries before Gage published her quickly censored book. How ironic, I thought, that these two people both happened to extol the same tenet—of truth seeking through, not public approval but personal agency—in their writings, one against the act that (temporarily) wiped out the other. How ironic, I thought, that this very same conception of the truth happens to be the foundation of (The Missing Library). How ironic, I thought.

As Lori Brown talked about the logistical hurdles the Matilda Joslyn Gage Library faced, in its community, content, and actual architectural design, I couldn’t help but think how apropos these two quotes were to Annie Shaw’s goal for the community of Dumbo. That as libraries, historically viewed as a community’s collective knowledge databank, lose their historical function to the great information highway known as Google and therefore, their funding and therefore—in some unfortunate cases—their existence, these communities lose a place to come together to exchange their own knowledge too. (The Missing Library) asks Dumbo neighbors and visitors what do you think about that? What do we do about that?

Or, more cynically, what is the true definition of “library” when you can’t just say “a place with books”?

Posted by Katie, DAC Communication Intern