HistoryLink Tours

Lynne Yamamoto (b. 1961) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Massachusetts. She was born in Hawaii and is of Japanese descent. Her work explores class, immigration, home, identity, memory, and the notion of place. She is interested in how narratives of seemingly ordinary people, open out to have larger implications historically and geographically. She also has ties to Washington, receiving her B.A. in Art from The Evergreen State College in Olympia in 1983.

This piece, Of Memory, was commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture in 2003 as part of the “Library Unbound” project. Yamamoto spent two weeks doing an artist’s residency learning about the inner workings of the library. The result was this sculptural work made of cast polyester resin fiberglass that suggests a spectral trace of the library’s card catalog system—something that is no longer actively used.

Card catalogs were large cabinets of small drawers each holding hundreds of cards about the size of an index card. Thousands and thousands of these cards captured information about each book in the library’s holdings, and, until the 1980s, were the only way to locate something in a large library. With the advent of computerized online catalogs, card catalogs became obsolete. However, the transfer of information from the cards to the digitized system at SPL took time and not everything was able to be transferred—the notation on some cards was too idiosyncratic to replicate, for example. Some of the original card catalogs still exist in the back rooms of the library, serving as an archived record of the collection up until a certain time.

As you made your way from the elevator to this piece, you passed the entrance to the Hugh and Jane Ferguson Seattle Room, which houses the library’s special collections—thousands of items illuminating Seattle’s culture and local history. Of Memory was specifically placed near the Seattle Room as it’s the place that houses the library’s historical holdings. It is also near the upper entrance to the library’s “book spiral,” a unique feature of the building’s design that displays the entire nonfiction collection in a continuous, wheelchair-accessible run from Levels 6 through 9. The library’s general collections, including that of the book spiral, are ordered by the Dewey Decimal System—a widely used classification and call number system created by Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) in the late nineteenth century. Dewey also founded the Library Bureau, a company started in Boston in 1876, which manufactured cards and cabinets for card catalog systems.

The next works we’ll view are back on the first floor. Take the elevator back down to Level 1 or, walk around to your right while viewing Yamamoto’s work and head down the book spiral (Levels 9 through 6), and then continue down using the escalators or stairs. The next piece is on the first floor on the south side of the building near the Fourth Avenue entrance (or to the left as you exit the elevators). The work is located on the ground—Literacy/ESL/World Languages (LEW) Floor by Ann Hamilton.