Library of Dust

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU presents

LIBRARY OF DUST

Fifteen writers, artists, photojournalists, historians, and cultural critics
respond to David Maisel's remarkable photographic excavation 
of a warehouse of ashes otherwise lost to time

Monday, April 13 at 7pm

The Angel Orensanz Foundation

172 Norfolk Street (just south of Houston)

 

with
Ulrich Baer, Rachel Cohen, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Karen Lang, 
Jonathan Lethem, David Maisel, Geoff Manaugh, Ted Mooney, 
Bill Morrison, Joel Meyerowitz, Gilles Peress, Michael Roth, 
Luc Sante, Vijay Seshadri & Lawrence Weschler

                           

This event, which will include talks, readings, a short film, and projection of 
David Maisel's Library of Dust photographs, is free and open to the public on a first-come, first-in basis.

  "Library of Dust, from the photographer David Maisel, may well be this year's most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel's book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before."

                                       --The New York Times, November 28, 2008
                      

The Oregon State Insane Asylum, opened in 1883 on a hill just east of Salem and renamed the Oregon State Hospital in 1913, became in part a warehouse for the state’s anonymous unwanted.  When residents died and went unclaimed by family, their bodies were cremated with the ashes remanded to copper canisters, which in turn themselves got warehoused.  Decades passed, the canisters blossomed forth with all manner of colorful corrosions, the hospital started getting shut down, well into the process of which, around 2005, with what remained of the hospital under new leadership, the canister depot itself came to light.  The photographer David Maisel rushed to the scene to compile the remarkable record that has become the book and traveling exhibition, Library of Dust.  The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU decided to convene an evening of witness and response to Maisel’s project at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, once among the city’s first synagogues and itself one of the most magnificently evocative ruins in the region.