CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco, CA) is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to reflecting on this question through temporary exhibitions, public events, and in-depth research. It is part of California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Wattis Institute has been a partner of the A.R.T. Library Program since 2016.

A.R.T. Library Program Questionnaire gathers insights from librarians and publishers within the Program's distribution network to reconsider and reflect on what it means to make art books public today.

• How would you characterize the books that you publish?
  

Unlike most institutes for contemporary art, our publications program does not focus mainly on exhibition catalogs. While we do produce catalogs for our major group exhibitions, most of our books are either collaborations with artists on specific aspects of their work, like Andrea Fraser’s 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics or Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas: Word Weapons, or part of A Series of Open Questions. Each book in the latter series includes newly commissioned writing as well as a selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis’s year-long research seasons dedicated to single artists, creating an expansive and carefully edited ecosystem of ideas and voices.

• How would you define the audience for your books?
  

Most of the people who buy our books are artists, curators, and other arts professionals, as well as students and professors. A Series of Open Questions has a broader audience, and encompasses anyone interested in contemporary issues in visual art but also in culture and the world more broadly.

• Has the way books are distributed changed in the last five years? (If so, how does it affect what or how you publish?)
  

We previously did more walk-in sales, but now the majority of sales happen online. Because we are so small, it’s very helpful for us to work with distribution partners, like DAP in the U.S. and Idea Books in Europe, to help disseminate our publications. In addition, we sell bulk orders to independent bookstores around the country and world, and we try to go to book fairs whenever possible. It’s nice to be able to talk to people about the books in person.

• When did you start participating in the A.R.T. Library Program?
  

Our first donation was made in January 2016.

• How do you decide what to donate to the program?
  

We were contacted by the program at the perfect time! We had just begun inventorying our older publications and realized we had boxes and boxes of them just sitting in storage, many more than we needed to keep for our archive. The program offered the perfect opportunity to get those books out into the world where they could be read and appreciated. Since then, we’ve continued to donate publications as a way to reach readers who might not otherwise come across our books.

• How does the A.R.T. Library Program complement your distribution strategies?
  

Because we have a very niche audience that is familiar with the Wattis, the A.R.T. Library Program is a great opportunity for us to reach a broader audience, introducing them not only to the artists and ideas in our publications, but also to the Wattis itself.