Bookish: Billboards say it all
are now featured in “Sites of Reason,” an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“It was a way to make this language available to people walking down a street or waiting for a bus,” Fowler said.
Fowler’s billboard project, titled “it is so, is it so,” delivers the same sentiments on a larger scale, urging drivers to contemplate destiny and existence as they hurtle — or, if they’re trapped in traffic, creep — west.
“They’re sort of about the queer community, which is my community,” Fowler said. “But I think when you’re driving past those billboards, anyone could relate.”
The phrase that always seems to resonate with viewers the most is “the difference is spreading,” Fowler said, which appears on her westernmost billboard.
The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project began in Florida in fall 2013 and will end in spring 2015 in California. Created by Zoe Crosher and co-curated by Crosher and Shamim Momin, LAND’s director, the project revisits the mid-19th-century notion of continental expansion. Says Momin: “By physically moving through and mapping the very landscape that has been so fantasized, dreamed about and capitalized upon … the artists have the opportunity to address their work to the idea in a variety of ways — opaque or direct, tangential or political, macro and micro.”
Along with the billboards, which will stay up through July, Fowler created free lending libraries in shops and coffeehouses along the route, stocked with 15 favorite titles that riff on reading, writing, gender identity and/or homosexuality. Among them: “De Profundis” by Oscar Wilde, “Maurice” by E.M. Forster, “Other Voices, Other Rooms” by Truman Capote and “Two Serious Ladies” by Jane Bowles.
“I put them there in the hopes that someone would stumble upon them and really like them,” said Fowler, who doesn’t care if the books are returned to LAND or not.
At least two of the libraries — at Gator Junction BBQ in Wallisville and Stuckey’s in Anahuac — are already cleaned out.
“People didn’t ask much about the books,” said Stephanie Desormeaux, a cashier and cook at Gator Junction BBQ, where charming antiques compete with beer signs and the pulled pork sandwich is as good as any in the state. “But we ran out eight or nine days after we put them out.”
Rashid Mehmood, manager of the Anahuac Stuckey’s, said it took four days for the books to disappear at his store, although Fowler’s signage remains. Pasted above a small “the difference is spreading” poster is a piece of paper that says: “Eve Fowler’s lending library — please take a book.”
It’s a good thing the books are gone. It means those titles — like the billboards — are already out there, in the world.