When I visited the Museum on Wednesday (June 20, 2018), so much was the same as it was almost a year ago.  However, there were a few new exhibits and this one took my fancy.  I’m a librarian (retired), after all, and this, my friends, is about BOOKS!  I wish I could have captured the mattresses, pillows, bed headboards, and spiral stairs that accompanied many of these exhibits.  My photos really only give you a small inkling of the look of the whole exhibit.

There was a room where overlaid video showed people dancing (modern dance) to a song from my generation –  The Look of Love by Dusty Springfield.  The overarching theme, in my opinion, was Love.  You can hear it in the music; see it in the man and woman dancing, in the titles of the book jackets and book covers that are mounted in a variety of ways, and read it in the huge oval installation comprised of book inscription pages.  There is a whole, six foot deep, wall of hundreds of silver-looking chains hanging from the ceiling, which you have to pass through in order to get from one side of the exhibition to another,   There appeared to be one Museum attendant whose job was mainly to untangle the chains after a few people traveled through. And, there is another area that has dozens of dangling mirrored balls, disco balls if you will, that are hanging only a few inches from the floor with a few feet between them. (No one walked through the disco balls, I guess because there was a path around them and it might actually hurt.)

Valeska Soares did a wonderful job! http://www.phxart.org/exhibition/valeska-soares

This is the oval of inscriptions.  Some are handwritten by the other or a gift-giver.  The majority are the printed dedications by the author.  What you see is a collage of single pages covering at least twenty feet of wall.

Close-ups of the individual pages.  Some are pretty fascinating.

I liked this wall best of all.  It’s so colorful and most of the titles are easily read.  Of course, your neck may start getting uncomfortable trying to read the high up titles, if you “middle aged” as I am.  Also, these sections of library stairs are awfully cute, and tempting.

This was my second choice.  Bookshelves with the actual books, but they are all variations on beige and brown.  If you look very closely, you realize that every single title appears to contain the word Love.  Many are written in languages other than English, but you can still see the word Love – Amour (French), Amor (Spanish), Amore (Italian).   At least, those were the ones I recognized, but the fonts appeared to be very similar and, at first glance, the piece is rather drab.