Jacqueline Thompson, a librarian at the Meader Fine Arts Library in the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts has created a unique and engaging Blackout Poetry event designed to highlight Banned Books Week. Participants are invited to transform pages of text into beautiful and thought-provoking pieces of art at the library.
“We coincided the event to go with the larger celebration of the freedom to read—Banned Books Week,” Thompson says. “We’ll have pages weeded from books to give them kind of a new life once they have been taken out of the collection. We are going to make these into some really cool art pieces.”
Poetry is created on the pages by strategically blacking out with a marker the words one does not want, leaving legible the words wanted and from those forming a poem. The legible words can be read from left to right or up and down—that is up to the creator. Participants will be able to take their pages home after the event.
“I think it’s important to celebrate the freedom to read,” Thompson says. “The American Library Association started Banned Books Week in 1982. It was an effort to bring together everyone from the book community to share in this idea that every reader has a book and every book for its reader. We shouldn’t be standing in the way of that, because books are for everyone and, by extension, art is for everyone. That is the mission of KIA.”
The event will take place September 25, September 27, and September 28, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Meader Fine Arts Library at the KIA. It is open to all ages and the admission to the library at these hours is free.
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