Letters for the Future is a group exhibition and series of experimental public programs curated by DOT in collaboration with BPL Presents, the Library’s Arts and Culture team. Across media and modes, the project focuses on transformative formats for reading, writing, speaking, and thinking together.
Letters for the Future celebrates the library as one of the few remaining intellectual, creative, and civic commons still freely available. Curated by DOT in collaboration with BPL Presents, the Library’s Arts and Culture team, the show spotlights works from dozens of artists and collectives, across media and modes—paintings, videos, sculptures, performances, works on paper, books and zines—that consider text and image relationships, distribution, and participation in unexpected ways. In tandem with the exhibition, a range of artists, designers, educators and activists will host a series of experimental public programs that aim to deepen BPL’s role as a site of social learning and community building.
Embracing an open-source ethos to share conceptual and aesthetic “tools” for public library-goers, Letters for the Future positions art and design—and the forms of collectivity, learning, healing, and resistance they can engender—as powerful agents of transformation. At a moment when rapidly advancing communication and intelligence technologies are destabilizing existing categories of authorship and systems of circulation, Letters for the Future starts from a shared curiosity about the evolution of language and text as both artistic subject and material. With an eye towards providing maximum access and provoking exploration of our ever-changing technological and political world, the exhibition and accompanying programs seek to reframe how we envision collective futures.
As part of this collaboration, Letters for the Future invites BPL cardholders to borrow a selection of works by the artists and collectives in the exhibition for a three-week period. In launching this special, borrowable art collection, BPL and DOT offer a simple, but radical, proposal: that art should be available to all, to live with and learn from every day.
Join us on Monday, November 3 at 6:00pm for the public opening + special event to celebrate Letters for the Future! It will feature the New York debut of Past Words / Future Words, a dynamic prototype of a participatory performance plus speculative reading × writing workshop from DOT founder Prem Krishnamurthy. 💫
