Reading the Signs
NEW HAVEN CT, 2023: The current wave of restrictions on books and on the free exchange of ideas is a sign of democracy in peril. This project is a collective, public expression of the Freedom to Read Statement, originally written by and for librarians and publishers in 1953 and updated in 2023. Students, teachers, and librarians from six New Haven high schools, along with members of the New Haven and Yale library communities, joined in a poetic street march to the New Haven Free Public Library and Yale’s Beinecke Plaza, accompanied by the Amistad High School’s Wolfpack Drumline. Created in conjunction with the exhibition Art, Protest, and the Archives, a collection of artifacts documenting myriad voices of artistic dissent throughout the past century.
Download the Reading the Signs informational flyer
Press coverage of this project:
“Behind the drumline, some of the high schoolers carried posters of frequently-challenged books. Others held up words provided by the Class Action Collective — words that would soon be arranged in sentences calling for the students’ right to read, but that at first were a jumble of isolated nouns, verbs, and conjunctions dispersed randomly through the crowd. For much of the march, the posters’ intended meanings were powerfully inaccessible, evoking the frustration of not being able to access a book.”
— Laura Glesby, New Haven Independent
