A Library Too Big to Ban
Book bans at public institutions have been on the rise in recent years. Since Fall 2021, PEN America has tracked over 10,000 book bans in public schools across the country. Of those books, 37% had characters of color or themes of race and racism and 36% featured LGBTQ+ characters of themes. Recently, Paul Collins, a Nashville artist and Austin Peay State University (APSU) professor, organized over 85 artists and writers to create a 25 volume Unbannable Library as a direct community response to these statistics.
Paul Collins’s Art Practice
Collins describes his painting practice as occurring both in seclusion and in public. In addition to painting in his studio, he creates drawing essays in public places such as Downtown Nashville and the Chancery Courthouse. “I’ll visit a place around town and go back every day for two or three weeks with the goal of just learning more about my environment,” he says. He believes these drawing essays fed into his desire to create public art projects. In this vein, every two years he paints and distributes hundreds of free “vote” signs to anyone who asks.
The first large art books Collins created were “an extension of my studio painting practice,” he says. “It was a way of sneaking more paintings into a form. When I dreamed of making a book big enough that I could hide in it, that’s a really personal experience that I was describing and something that I pursued in my studio for the last seven years.”
Collins displayed six of these books outside of the Tennessee State Museum at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books. That was where he met Tiffeni Fontno, the Director of the Peabody Library at Vanderbilt University, who was volunteering at the Festival. He recalls, “We just hit it off. In her duties, she would cycle through my area. Every time she came through, we added another layer and another idea to what at first was to be an exhibition of my books and ended up at the idea of asking the voices affected by book bans to participate.”
The Unbannable Library
According to Collins, the Unbannable Library is “a public art project that coincides with banned books week and is designed to fight censorship and intimidation in our public libraries.” The books offer a range of art and text inspired by banned books as well as original works by local writers.
Earlier this year, Collins began contacting artists he knew in Nashville and Clarksville and found his first participants. Just before Memorial Day, he reached out to poet Christine Hall to create a book together. By late June, he thought there would be four or five books. However, word spread, and by mid-July there were 25 projects underway. Collins spent the summer making 20 big blank books. Apart from a few instances when he matched artists and writers, most of the teams came together organically.
Collins provided artists with the blank books and the stands, but he did not offer any money for materials or time. “People spent a lot of sweat equity making this project where they don’t even have the object…I’m really humbled by the active participation of everybody who’s gotten involved and the librarians who have made this happen.”
He believes so many artists and writers joined the project because “this is a passionate issue for people when you talk about book bans and [their] chilling effect. Censorship is not just the removal of one volume from a collection or the statement of desire to remove it. It is a chilling effect where people are afraid to talk about the issue…I think everybody feels it.”
The Unbannable Library debuted at 12 libraries across Nashville and APSU during Banned Book Week. The first time all of the Unbannable books will be displayed together is at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books when they return to the location that sparked their creation. You can find them at the Carillon and the Court of Three Stars at Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park.
Future Focus
One of the reasons Collins believes these books are effective at encouraging people to think about book bans is because they are “laughably, ridiculously large…they have just enough structure to hold themselves up and be able to be read.” Having these colorful and visually engaging books in libraries causes people to pause and laugh.
According to Collins, “Book bans are introducing intimidation and stress into what are our most notable civic places…these books laugh at that a bit, and I want to grow that response.” One way he hopes to do so is to increase the number of books and create a lending Library that can continually be displayed at different libraries.
He would also like to see the Library expand to other communities in the state. For example, if a library in Memphis was interested in hosting an Unbannable text, he would like to see a team of local artists and writers make a book that is specific to that city. Ultimately, he wants to see books that represent their extremely localized community. To that end, he’s already received a request from a public library in Nashville about creating a book about a specific text they believe would resonate with their community.
In the long term, Collins wants these big books to affect “kids walking into a library and seeing a giant book that they’re not afraid of.” He believes the Unbannable Library will have a robust future that keeps the conversation about book banning and public libraries at the forefront of people’s minds by spawning dialogue and encouraging library patrons to see these Unbannable books as welcoming and accessible.