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Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn meditates on the destruction of libraries and the parallel loss of knowledge through the ages. Over the course of history, libraries and their countless bodies of information have been lost to fire, flooding, or acts of looting. Today, many ancient texts lay in fragments and crucial evidence connecting early scientific discoveries remains buried. Whether carved into stone tablets, copied diligently on papyrus scrolls, or transferred to the digital cloud, all forms of text remain vulnerable to erasure.

Using books that were withdrawn from the library’s collection and scheduled for disposal, Glynn creates a series of sculptural objects based on ancient slab stellae and stone tablets that were traditionally used to record writing. The exhibition also includes ephemera from a 1986 arson fire that damaged the original Central Library building and ruined a large percentage of its collection.

Liz Glynn creates large-scale installations and participatory performances using epic historical narratives to explore the potential for change in the present tense. Drawing upon imagery from the rise and fall of Rome, to the looting of antiquities held in Western museums, her practice seeks to embody dynamic cycles of growth and decay. Increasingly, she operates outside of existing institutions to create intimate environments engaging a broader range of emotional responses to social and political questions. Her work has been presented at The New Musuem (NYC), LACMA, Paula Cooper Gallery (NYC), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), and Arthouse at the Jones Center (Austin). She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and her BA from Harvard College.

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