Client: San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture

Overview

In 2013 Donald Lipski was asked to design a work for the 300 seat auditorium located in the new San Diego Central Library, an important new civic space that serves as a venue for concerts, lectures and overflow City Council meetings. He lined the 8.5’ tall and 50’ long wall with 1,700 open books, overlapping and screwed into the wall, and covered with stainless steel mesh. The work also functions as an important acoustical element in the auditorium. The work was commissioned in 2003, but political delays in the building of the Rob Quigley designed library kept it from being completed until 2013. The title, as is Lipski’s habit in his book works, comes from the title of one of the books used in the sculpture, Hiding My Candy, by The Lady Chablis, an American actress, author, and transgender club performer, made famous in the John Berendt book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Goals

“A surface that’s both textured and soft will absorb sound. It strikes me as poetic that the books on the wall will offer fresh, white pages with black words that go into people’s eyes, and, presumably, the auditorium will host authors speaking about their work and their words will go into the books.”
- Donald Lipski, Artist