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Josh Greene: Bound to be HeldPost an Event »
Read Our Review »Contemporary Jewish Museum
March 26 - June 28, 2015Info
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http://thecjm.org/
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(415) 655-7800
Josh Greene. Bound to Be Held: A Book Show, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo: Johnna Arnold.
Bound to be Held: A Book Show celebrates the relationship between a reader and a book and extends Greene’s career-long interest in instigating social interaction among people.
The exhibition, in two parts, includes a selection from Greene’s ongoing work Read by Famous. Since 2013, Greene has asked a wide range of well-known and successful people to pluck meaningful books from their shelves and donate them to the project. Each affirms that he or she has personally read that copy and provides accompanying notes about why the book was meaningful or important. For the exhibition, a sampling of twenty-five of these books are on the gallery wall, alongside photographs of inscriptions, notes, annotations, and other markings that the book donors have made. On view will be contributions from Gavin Newsom (Make it in America by Andrew Liveris), Isiah Thomas (The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X), Jill Soloway (Valencia by Michelle Tea), Junot Díaz (The Earth by Arthur Beiser, from the publishers of Life Magazine’s Nature Library series), and many more. Greene plans to auction the books through the website to benefit literacy campaigns.
The second part of the project is called The Library of Particular Significance, consisting of approximately one thousand books donated by the general public, also with statements about the donors’ relationship to a specific book. Visitors can browse the shelves, which Greene periodically rearranges at whim by such organizing principles as donors’ zodiac signs and more. A special card catalog with further information is also available. The Library of Particular Significance functions as a lending library, so visitors can temporarily check out books. A variety of reading events take place inThe Library during the run of the exhibition.