Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women's Bookstore (1973-1996), 2016-18
texts chosen from the 1973 catalog of the Vancouver Women's Bookstore
dimensions variable
texts chosen from the 1973 catalog of the Vancouver Women's Bookstore
dimensions variable
"The Vancouver Women’s Bookstore opened in the summer of 1973. We’ve been told it set up shop in an old Victorian house somewhere on Richards Street. Rent was cheap—cheap enough that the Bookstore’s owners could afford to make donations to local women’s centres and other projects they cared about. We heard they lent Ferron (do you know her?) a grand to help her record her first album. From the street you could see the store’s bookshelves, then behind that, up a couple of steps, was a raised area where there was a desk and a few couches. There was coffee and a small library. The walls back there were covered in posters, mostly from a women’s collective in Chicago. We’ve been told that the shelves were stained by the same volunteers who would keep the place running for the next twenty-some years [. . .] The Bookstore was a setting where individual experience could be elaborated, made material, through social life. The books provided a common language; the shelves, a common space for conversation—between generations, continents." --Vincent Tao
Exhibited at 221A in Vancouver, B.C., between November10, 2016 - January 14, 2017 for the exhibition "Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women's Bookstore (1973-1996)"; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, B.C. between January 12-April 8, 2018 for the exhibition "GLUT: Beginning with the Seventies".
Photo: Rachel Topham, courtesy the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Exhibited at 221A in Vancouver, B.C., between November10, 2016 - January 14, 2017 for the exhibition "Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women's Bookstore (1973-1996)"; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, B.C. between January 12-April 8, 2018 for the exhibition "GLUT: Beginning with the Seventies".
Photo: Rachel Topham, courtesy the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.