On libraries and librarians

Special places and relationships growing up in Los Angeles.  

Vaginal Davis: Well, I, you know, being that I was an overachiever in school, from elementary school to university, it’s like libraries were a big part of that.

This is, of course, before the Internet and Wikipedia and Google when you actually had to talk to a real person, and librarians were these fantastical human beings that have so much knowledge to dispense to you. And I was always enamored with them. And they befriended me, I befriended them, and they were mentors to me.
And my local library in my neighbourhood in Los Angeles, it was the Pio Pico Library, and I had my first exhibition there at this Pio Pico Library where I was fixated with the Oz books, by L. Frank Baum.

And I started creating dioramas and drawings based on the characters of the Oz books, and I just was giving it, as a present, to one of the main librarians there. And, she wound up, turning it into a display in the library. And I was just like, oh, my God, this is… I couldn’t believe it. And it got a lot of attention. I was like eight years old at the time. So that operated as my very first exhibition.

But I would make sort of sojourns, pilgrimages to all the local branches throughout the city, going to all the different libraries in the Los Angeles library system, in Los Angeles. And, of course, the queen of all the Los Angeles libraries was the main downtown and I knew all these librarians and, and talked with, and spent a lot of time with them. And when books were going to be thrown away, they would save books to give to me, to add to my collection. So, these were… these relationships with these librarians were very, very special to me.

And John Waters, he talks about… because we did something together at the Homotopia in Liverpool back in, what year was that, 2013. Some time ago. And he, John Waters, is saying that young people need to give mercy fucks to librarians. And I completely… that John, he says some things that are just like, wow, it just hits it on the nose. They need to give mercy fucks to librarians. Librarians, it’s that important, you know.