Each month in the Art Department library staff Radiyah and Eileen pick a theme for the book display and curate books related to that topic. This month’s theme is Road Trippin: A Tour of Places Imagined and Realized. Below you'll find a few highlights from this month's list.

Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948-2015) is a sculpture artist who created detailed utopian cityscapes mainly using paper and cardboard. Kingelez’s work was largely inspired by the political happenings in his city and country of Kinshasa, Zaire, where he lived until his death. His work was conceived as proposals for building a better world.

“Architects and builders worldwide can try to learn from my perceptions so as to help the forthcoming generation. I’m dreaming of cities of peace.”

Check out his self-titled book, Bodys Isek Kingelez for more of his work.

Rachel Whiteread primarily makes concrete or plaster casts of objects, creating new spaces from everyday objects. In the self-titled book Rachel Whiteread, you see Whiteread’s Ghost, a cast of the inside of a room House, a concrete cast of the inside of a three-story house, and Untitled (iLibrary), a cast of a bookshelf. Shedding Life is another book that focuses more on House and other furniture-related casts. 

In Do Ho Suh: Drawings, there are a variety of projects clearly inspired by architecture. In one project, Suh covers buildings and interior rooms with vellum or mulberry paper and uses colored pencil or graphite to create large-scale rubbings or frottage as it is also known.

George Widener, another self-taught artist, creates future megalopolises through his own calculations and interest in calendar dates, diagrams, and codes combining historical events with his own computations. In his self-titled book, Widener shows his obsessive passion for numerology and data through his drawings.

The book display Road Trippin’: A Tour of Places Imagined and Realized will be up until August 31, 2023 in the Art Department of the Parkway Central Library, but you can browse all of our past book lists here.

And if you like imaginary worlds, don’t forget to check out the exhibit  Mapping Imagination at the Parkway Central Library which will remain up until the end of August 2023.