Coal Creek Library
Coal Creek Library
Coal Creek Library
Artist

Coal Creek Library

Date2007-2009
MediumCartographic assemblage, archival pigment print mounted on aluminum
Dimensions84 x 51 in. (213.4 x 129.5 cm) Framed Size: 86 x 52 in. (218.4 x 132.1 cm)
Credit LineDC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank Collection
Object numberDCCAH2009.047ab
ClassificationsPhotographs
Locations
  • Currently Not on View
DescriptionThe oldest public library west of the Mississippi River is in tiny Vinland, Kansas, and Martha Cutter Kelley Smith was its librarian from 1926 until around 2011. Long before that, she had become the oldest librarian in the country. She passed away in 2014 at the age of 108. My mother had grown up in Vinland, and while passing through in 2007 I peered into the library’s plate glass window and was intrigued. When I learned the same librarian who had checked out books to my mother as a child in the 1930s still worked there, I wondered: what does a space look like when a single person has presided over it for 83 years? I returned and spent two full days in the library and with Martha. My narrative was simply showing her doing the tasks of an ordinary day, and I developed a composition that allowed me to revel in the room’s detail. The multiple portraits are a nod to the Sienese Master of the Osservanza’s “The Meeting of St. Anthony with St. Paul the Hermit,” c. 1430-35.