Meet the Women Using Their Libraries to Create Spaces for Black Art, Literature

Craig D Lindsey, Chron.com, August 15, 2023

The Reading Room and ART IS BOND.  are highlighting Black authors and artists through their selections.

 

Amarie Gipson and Janice Bond are native Houstonians who are also some first-class book hoarders. 

Gipson has been building her book collection since the 12th grade, while Bond says she’s lived and traveled with her collection for a long time. But both these ladies have put their collections on display in two different spaces. 

 

Last month, Gipson opened The Reading Room, a reference library and cultural incubator that’s currently over at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s CAMHLAB in POST Houston, scheduled to run through Sunday, Dec. 3. Gipson got the idea for a reading space before COVID turned us into shut-ins, initially launching the Room as an online reference site earlier this year. Before the opening, Gipson held a pop-up preview in March at Sanman Studios, where Bond joined her for a public discussion. “I wanted to create a space where I could be surrounded by art books—not just any art books, but books by Black artists for and about Black artists,” Gipson said.

 

Over in Montrose, Bond has a lot of her literature stored at her art gallery/project space ART IS BOND.  which will be approaching its one-year anniversary next month. Pre-pandemic life also inspired Bond’s reading space. While living in Chicago pre-COVID, guests would visit Bond’s home and marvel at her personal library. “People would come over and socialize,” Bond said. “But one of my favorite things people would do is see something that interests them. And even if they wanted to thumb through it for a few moments, it was an opportunity for people to kind of lose themselves or educate themselves just for a moment, or have some sort of tactile experience with a book or a publication or a catalog… It usually incites some sort of memory or connection.”

 

Bond and Gipson have had extensive careers in the art world. Along with being a cultural architect, an art advisor, and an interdisciplinary artist, Bond was previously CAMH’s deputy director. Currently, she’s the international director of civic art and immersive experiences for experiential art space Seismique. As for Gipson (who is currently the Freedman’s Town Lead Research Fellow at CAMH), she’s held cultural positions at such art spaces as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and was the former arts & culture editor for Houstonia. She’s even been known to get a party started by spinning records under the moniker DJ DOUBLEDUTCH. (Her PHYSICAL THERAPY shindigs usually provide the funding for her book-buying.) 

 

 

Both The Reading Room and ART IS BOND. specialize in Black art, Black literature, and Black literature about Black art. The Reading Room currently has 175 texts on deck (out of the 500 that Gipson has collected) at the Lab, where visitors can flip through them in the space. Monographs from such artists as Kehinde Wiley and exhibition catalogs like Gordon Parks’s Stokely Carmichael photographs, which were recently displayed at MFAH, share shelf space with Barry Jenkins’s hardcover screenplay for his Oscar-winning film Moonlight. 

ART IS BOND's collection—located in a built-in, overhead bookcase—goes beyond visual and performing arts. “Some of them are astrology, architecture,” Bond said. “There is one book that’s about where architects like to sleep. There’s an archive of old maps from Chicago in the 1970s.”

 
Gipson and Bond also use their spaces to promote Third Ward bookstore Kindred Stories, owned by Houstonian Terri Hamm, which also promotes Black artists and artisans. Gipson has sprinkled her collection with books that are available at Kindred (they’re the ones with the green dot sticker on them). “People ask that question all the time,” she said. “They come in and see something that they like, [and] they usually come back up to the front and say, ‘Hey, can I buy this? Are these for sale?’... I’m sending a lot of traffic over to Kindred because people are interested in buying the books once they see them.”
 
ART IS BOND.  has a wall of books from Kindred that are available for purchase. “I wanted to figure out how I could support Kindred Stories as a business, while also creating some spaces of exposure and engagement from people who may be or may not be familiar with them,” Bond said. “And what immediately came to mind was that I knew I wanted to have books for sale in the gallery. Why not prioritize working with a Black woman-owned bookstore here in the city of Houston that has a wonderful collection that invests in community engagement and programming, and essentially just shares a lot of the same ethos that I do?”
 
 
The Reading Room andART IS BOND. are both making it their mission to promote African American arts and culture in the city. On Aug. 23, Gipson will bring in DJ/ethnomusicologist Flash Gordon Parks for a conversation/listening session inspired by the musical legacy of Freedman’s Town. And Bond is still exhibiting artwork from local and visiting artists of color, like the current “Ming Smith: Catching the Light” exhibit. Bond says that she’ll be collaborating with Gipson on digitizing her own book archive online. 
 

For these women, it’s all about forming a (wait for it!) bond and making sure everybody knows there’s plenty of Black art—whether it’s on paper, on walls, or on wax—in this town. 

“I’m very happy that I’m not alone, and that we’ve been all around the world and come back to Houston to realize that it’s important for Houston to have [this],” Gipson said.