How did I come to be both an artist and a librarian? From the start, I never wanted to support myself with my art. Way back then my art was private. In order for the work to be true, it was best protected from the whims of the market. And since I had to work, I might as well contribute to the common weal, and do nothing that could harm the social fabric. After several years of experimenting with social work, sales, bookkeeping, cocktail waitressing, organizing Camp Fire Girls, census-taking, and other sundry occupations, it was finally librarianship that demanded the most of my top-notch liberal arts education and my desire to do good in a world so complex that it was often impossible to know what was good from what was not.

To work as an art librarian is to work among images from the past and present – reproduced in and out of context. And not only those one searches for – but those stumbled across en route to somewhere else.

I entered art librarianship thinking that it would be but an adjunct to my activities as an artist. I have come to realize that the reverse has occured. My art has come to elaborate on my role as a librarian in an architectural museum library.* It reflects and redefines my constant exposure to architectural imagery and criticism. This example is from a series of mixed media works which resulted from a trip I made to India two years ago.

Effect of Fish on the Human Heart is a book in a box produced collaboratively by three individuals who, at the start of the project in Spring 1990, were all employed in the National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, D.C. The book was written and produced in an edition of twenty copies by Alfred Willis. It features a frontispiece by Susan Clay, and Roger Lawson participated in the design and construction of the book’s box. The matt black box, produced in an edition of twelve copies, incorporates two niches, one containing a basswood fish sculpted and painted by Clay, the other containing the book. The book is secured in its niche by a fishhook which swivels on a brass screw to permit its removal.