LIBRERÍA DONCELES

PABLO HELGUERA
JANUARY 13 - MARCH 31, 2017

Librería Donceles is a socially engaged art project consisting of an itinerant bookstore of more than 10,000 used books in Spanish. The participatory art installation is a meeting place for the community, hosting a series of bilingual salon-like gatherings for conversations, performances and workshops designed to encourage cultural understanding, tolerance, and social activism. 

Created by New York-based artist and educator Pablo Helguera out of a desire to address the lack of literary outlets that serve the growing Hispanic and Latino communities in the United States. Taking its name from the historic street, Calle Donceles, in Mexico City that is lined with used bookstores, the installation premiered in Brooklyn, NY in 2013 and has since traveled to Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Boston was the bookstore’s last stop! Librería Donceles has been the sole Spanish-language bookstore in every city it has occupied. There are millions of Spanish speakers in the US and yet a scarcity of books in Spanish.

Part functioning bookstore and part participatory installation, Librería Donceles confronts the very tangible implications of particular social dynamics, revealing social structures that exist within plain sight, while powerfully advocating for equity through the physical presence of a bookstore.  The situation has been made more critical by rapid transformations in publishing, with the rise of e-books and the demise of bookstores of all sorts.

About the Artist

Pablo Helguera is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.