Over this past year A.R.T.'s Library Program placed 20,828 free art books, donated by 50 publishers, in 464 public libraries, schools, and prisons in honor of Luis Camnitzer.

As Luis tells us in his statement below, literacy is fundamentally a tool for the redistribution of power. Art books can sharpen this tool, but for them to truly short-circuit hierarchies of knowledge, they must first be available in public spaces of reading and learning.

We hope you will add your support to Luis and help us continue to ensure art books are available to the widest possible readerships, offering conduits to literacy and perhaps a newly imagined world.

Please consider a tax-deductible contribution today.

"Reading has been a crucial part of my life from the time I was nine or ten. It was, and still is, an adventure into a different place or time. The novels of Jules Verne, Walter Scott, Alexander Dumas, but also an encyclopedia I read entry after entry. The pleasures of reading have always been connected to the physical qualities of the printed book.

The availabilty of printed books and teaching of reading/writing have been major parts of education, and that we should know how to read is often taken for granted. But there is little discussion of how those abilities are used.

Art Resources Transfer, and their Library Program, for which I am grateful, redistributes books and offers tools for how to use them. This results in the empowerment of the individual in the form of an encouraged, self-aware perception of the world. As soon as empowerment is introduced, the politics around the distribution of power becomes an indissoluble part of the educational process."

— Luis Camnitzer, 2022 A.R.T. Honoree