The Serving Library

The Serving Library at Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University, 2017. Photo: Robert Battersby

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The Serving Library is a non-profit organisation founded in New York in 2011 to develop a shared toolkit for artist-centred education and discourse through related activities of publishing and collecting. It comprises an annual journal (The Serving Library Annual) published simultaneously online and in print, an archive of framed objects on permanent display, and a public programme of workshops and events. It is run by Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and David Reinfurt.

For Liverpool Biennial 2018, The Serving Library will organise a series of free public talks hosted at Exhibition Research Lab, part of the John Lennon School of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University. A wide-ranging list of participants including economists, sociologists, media theorists, architects and painters are invited to variously address or refract the question borrowed from Friedrich Schiller to title the Biennial: Beautiful world, where are you? The speakers include Silke Otto-Knapp and Ei Arakawa, both artists in this year's Biennial; Eyal Weizman, founder of the independent research agency Forensic Architecture; and Candice Hopkins, a curator and writer interested in the history of indigeneity. The presentations will take place within The Serving Library's permanent collection of framed objects, each the source of an illustration that has appeared on the pages of its house journal The Serving Library Annual, or its predecessors Bulletins of The Serving Library and Dot Dot Dot. This archive, which includes items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, polaroids, airbrush paintings, and a car number plate, will be open to view throughout the Biennial. 

Founded in New York in 2011 by Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer and David Reinfurt, and based in Liverpool since 2016, The Serving Library is a non-profit organisation that variously serves as a publishing platform, a seminar room, a collection of framed objects, and an event space. The enterprise is rooted in a journal published biannually as Dot Dot Dot (2000-10) and Bulletins of The Serving Library (2011-17), and now annually as The Serving Library Annual. It is run by Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and David Reinfurt.

Since 2015 The Serving Library has worked with students from art and design schools including Royal College of Art, London, UK; Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and Dusseldorf Art Academy, Germany. Notable recent exhibitions of its collection include Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2017); CCA Glasgow, Scotland (2017); and Tate Liverpool, UK (2014).