Banned Books Spotlighted at the Institute Library

De-circulated: An Interpretation of Banned Books at the Institute Library. Photos Kapp Singer.

Two thick black lines form a nested pair of chevrons. Thinner tendrils jut off at various angles. In the background lies a field of colored blobs—yellow, pink, and gray. At first, the piece seems like just a collection of shapes. Looking a little longer reveals an abstracted tree, the trunk in the foreground and leaves in the back.

With the right book in hand, it quickly becomes clear which tree exactly: the outstretched pecan on the first edition cover of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
 
The piece by Karen Duncan Pape is part of the new exhibition De-circulated: An Interpretation of Banned Books, which opened last week at the Institute Library. Installed in the Gallery Upstairs, it features over a dozen photocollages by Pape, each of which remix the cover art of texts that are currently censored in certain school districts in the United States or which have been banned at some point in the past, both in this country and abroad.

Karen Duncan Pape's photocollage of the cover of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Courtesy of the artist.
 
The wall text beneath her reinterpretation of To Kill a Mockingbird notes that the book was pulled in certain districts in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, New York, and Indiana over the last several years. According to the American Library Association, whose data Pape used to research the banned books, Lee’s iconic novel was the 21st most frequently challenged text between 2000 and 2009. It has frequently ranked in the list’s top ten in the years since and was banned as early as 1966, for reasons ranging from its depictions of rape to its inclusion of racial slurs.
 
The work in De-circulated addresses censored books across a wide range of genres, from Albert Einstein’s Relativity, burned by the Nazis in the 1930s, to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which was the tenth most frequently challenged book between 2010 and 2019 in the U.S. 

Pape’s photocollage of the former is a simple dark and light blue field, streaked with scratchy textures. The latter appears as a dynamic pinwheel of color, the looping script of the popular Vintage International edition cover just peeking through.

Pape's photocollages of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (left) and Albert Einstein's Relativity (right). Courtesy of the artist.
 
The project began after Pape found herself horrified by the spate of book bans which spread across the U.S. in 2021. She was particularly upset about bans targeting authors of color and LBGTQ authors.
 
“I’m from a really small town in Virginia, and books were huge to me,” Pape said. “I always was reading, because books really exposed me to other ideas, other concepts, other countries.”
 
“Books gave me the courage to leave,” she said.
 
At the same time, Pape, who now lives in Charlottesville, was experimenting with multiple-exposure photographs. After taking pictures of books around her house and manipulating the images in Photoshop, she realized that her method could be used to draw attention to the issue of book banning. Pape said she hopes that by estranging texts through photocollage she is able to draw viewers in and make them think more deeply about what books bans do.
 
“We’re losing access to language, so I wanted the images to reflect that,” she said.
 
“My intention was to go at the issue aslant and create these pieces that would, first of all, raise attention to the problem, and secondly, stimulate conversation—and hopefully, inspire people to do something about it.”
 
Pape learned about the Institute Library through Joan Fitzsimmons, a New Haven-based artist who has previously exhibited work at The Gallery Upstairs. The two met at a photography review in Chicago, and Fitzsimmons connected Pape with curator Martha Lewis.
 
“I knew that it was something that we needed to address,” Lewis said. “People don’t understand that books are being banned in Connecticut.”
 
“It shows a massive distrust of your own children,” she added, referring to how the vast majority of bans today target schools.
 
“And an abrogation of your responsibility as a parent,” Pape said.

Maxim Schmidt, Karen Duncan Pape, and Martha Lewis.
 
Beyond Pape’s images, the show also features cases and shelves full of banned or once-banned books contributed by members of the Institute Library community and from the library’s own collection. Titles range from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, banned in certain places for obscenity, to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, removed from libraries across U.S. history first for its coarse language and more recently for its use of racial slurs, to Maurice Sendak’s illustrated story In the Night Kitchen, censored for nudity.
 
“I want people to be able to spend the summer going through the books,” Lewis said.

Lists of banned books hang at the far end of the gallery.
 
At the far end of the gallery, draped over the windows looking out onto Chapel St., are nine long sheets of paper. Printed in tiny text are the 4,250 books that were banned or challenged in school districts across the country in 2023. The volume of titles is staggering, as is the diversity of subjects—from As I Lay Dying to Pornography: Opposing Viewpoints. The endless and unadorned list is a sober counterpart to Pape’s beautiful photocollages, starkly communicating the extent of censorship in the contemporary U.S.
 
“Obviously there are correlations to be drawn between here and other repressive regimes,” Pape said.