This Miami Art Week, beachgoers will be able to take a spin with a book, courtesy of the British artist Es Devlin. The non-profit Faena Art has commissioned Library of Us, a 50ft-wide, triangular, rotating bookshelf that will be stocked with 2,500 books that have influenced Devlin’s work, thinking and life.
The sculptural bookshelf will be set within a reflecting pool and surrounded by a 70ft-long communal reading table; stools on one side of the table will rotate with the bookshelf while those on the outside stay stationary, providing opportunities for chance encounters between readers.
In a statement, Devlin says: “This installation seeks to express the vitality of the library through a series of encounters between viewers revolving to meet one another through language around a circular collective reading table.”
The reading table will be set every day with books from the artist’s personal collection, complete with underlinings, annotations and other marginalia. The installation will also feature a 30ft-wide scrolling LED screen that displays passages from 250 books, accompanied by audio of Devlin reading them.
The ambitious Library of Us will be the centrepiece of a capsule survey of Devlin’s work across the Faena Art campus. The nearby Faena Project Room will host an installation of her works on paper and paintings on glass, while the Faena Cathedral hosts another new commission, Reading Room.
Library of Us will run concurrently with Art Basel Miami Beach and the plethora of other Miami Art Week events, with voracious readers welcome from 1pm to 9pm daily, from 2 December to 7 December. Thereafter, the installation’s 2,500 books will be donated to South Florida institutions and organisations including schools and public libraries.
While the full catalogue of books to be featured in Devlin’s installation has not been announced yet, her choice to create a free outdoor reading space is particularly poignant given that Florida is by some measures the most censorious state in the US when it comes to literature. According to data compiled by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and analysed in a report by the free-speech non-profit Pen America, during the previous academic year, 33 school districts across the state pursued a total of 2,304 book bans, more than any other state.
Books removed from South Florida school libraries include Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—the novel on which the hit stage musical and blockbuster film Wicked are based. These titles are joined by Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, which has the dubious distinction of being the most-banned book in America.
This tendency has been supercharged by the state’s powerful “parental rights” movement, which has been embraced by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and resonates with many of his actions as part of his so-called “war on woke”.
This marks the tenth year that Faena Art has commissioned an artist’s project for Miami Art Week. Faena Art oversees the cultural initiatives of the Faena Group development company, which operates hotels and residences in Buenos Aires, New York, Miami Beach, Miami River and Tulum, Mexico.
Last year, Faena Art’s marquee commission was a large-scale Nicholas Galanin installation that imagined a colonial-era Spanish galleon emerging from the sand. Previous commissions included an Alfredo Jaar work shown on a floating digital billboard that went up and down the beach (in 2018), two monumental Buddhas made of ash by Zhang Huan (in 2019) and a sculptural installation of colourful, raised boardwalks by Paula de Solminihac (in 2022).
“Miami Art Week has always been a moment to ignite imagination and connect our community through culture,” Alan Faena, the collector and hotelier who launched Faena Art, says in a statement. “This year, with Es Devlin’s transformative installations, we are taking that vision to new heights, turning the iconic spaces of Faena Miami Beach into immersive experiences that invite reflection, dialogue, and connection.”
