Pollyanna and Peppermint: Libraries as a Site of Praxis
On January 17, 2018, Sepake Angiama and Clare Butcher of documenta 14’s aneducation team, spoke with Jesse McKee and Brian McBay from 221A in Vancouver about models for art education and programming, and the role of the library in creating ways of thinking and working together.
JESSE MCKEE: We are here today to talk about two different programs in art and education – aneducation, which was part of documenta 14 in both Athens and Kassel, and 221A, in Vancouver, which recently changed its programming model to a distributed system of research, public programs, fellowships and infrastructure production that is rooted in a new space called Pollyanna Library that hosts the organization’s praxis at large. 221A was a participant at documenta 14’s gathering Under the Mango Tree in Athens and Kassel, and since we both have taken the library as a site to work from and program through, I thought we could have a rich comparative conversation about our approaches to our ideas, sites and publics.
BRIAN MCBAY: 221A was founded by a student art collective, mostly antagonistic to the university we were studying at, Emily Carr University. After the first five years of arguing, we moved into a storefront in Vancouver’s Chinatown, a particularly embattled neighbourhood undergoing gentrification. I suppose it’s somewhat personal because my family had a business in Chinatown for quite a number of years. It closed down before I moved to Vancouver, so it’s a bit disconnected from me.
221A first operated under similar conditions to typical artist initiatives, where we found ways to augment the cost of running a program by sharing the rent and had a small portion of time and space dedicated to thinking about what was critical to us. We grew, not without struggle, from that collective model to a more expanded, partially government-supported organization over the next five years.
JM: Brian, you mentioned you were all students when you formed, but what’s important to add is that you studied across the art and design faculties. I hope what has resulted came from our different trainings and backgrounds. Brian and Michelle Fu came through industrial and graphic design; Stephan Wright and I from contemporary art, and then Vincent Tao from critical studies, activism and social organizing.
Our programming model at 221A revolves around a series of fellows who are with us for intermittent periods of time, anywhere from three months to two years. The fellows develop long-term projects based in research. The outcomes of the fellowships will be some sort of social, cultural or ecological infrastructure that exists in the world. As an example, one of our fellows, Amy Nugent, is investigating the histories of artists Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. They were lifelong collaborators, sharing a home and studio. They passed away three weeks apart in 1968 and had no children. You couldn’t have a shared will at
