In an era of diminishing public space and encroaching neoliberal privatization, the public library endures as one of the last universally accessible, non-commercial “third places.” It is a rare sanctuary where one can exist without the imperative to consume; a vital social infrastructure for collective life. Yet, this potential for sanctuary exists in tension with a deeper truth: the library is also a powerful architecture of exclusion. While its doors may be physically open, the knowledge systems within—the classifications, the canon; the logic of its collections—have historically been shaped by and for a dominant subject: white, male, propertied, and Western. For many, especially those from marginalized communities, the library has functioned as a site where their stories are absent, misrepresented, or relegated to the margins, rendering its promise of universal knowledge a conditional one.
This contradiction is also present within the art academy and its specialized libraries. Here, the urgent call for decolonial, queer, and feminist practices—for new narratives of making and meaning—collides with a canonical history and a classificatory logic that has long centered Western, white, and patriarchal perspectives. We cannot hope to dismantle these exclusionary systems using the very bibliographic and epistemological tools that built them. This project argues that transforming art education requires a radical reimagining of its foundational library. It proposes moving beyond the library as a passive repository to actively reconfigure it as a site of critical and creative praxis. Synthesizing Emily Drabinski’s framework of radical librarianship, which exposes the politics of classification, with Melissa Adler’s recovery of poikilia, the ancient, feminist method of “pleasurable mixture” practiced by the scholar-weaver Pamphila, this project develops tools to consciously re-weave the social and intellectual fabric of the library.
This project materializes in three intertwined forms: a feminist citation manual that guides a personal audit and reorientation of one’s sources; a bookmark intervention that transforms this ethos into a collective, physical protocol within the ArtEZ University of the Arts library; and an online webring developed by Chinouk Filique de Miranda that digitally connects the bibliographies and practices of feminist researchers, artists, and collectives. Together, they enact a practice of “unruly weaving” across analog and digital spaces; making citational biases visible, actively stitching new solidarity-driven connections across the shelves, and building a visible coalition of interdependent practitioners. This three-part intervention works to dismantle the canonical house and build, in its place, a living library of shared discovery.
This project is forthcoming in September 2026.