Kathryn Clark's abecedarium: A Site-Specific Installation in Thompson Library

New York City-based artist Kathryn Clark was invited to campus to create an installation based upon her response to Vassar's environment. She chose the library as the site of her project and discovered the recently retired card catalogue, boxed and bagged to be discarded. The chance encounter with the disassembled remnants of the card catalogue suggested a point of departure for her piece. The title, abecedarium, which refers to an alphabet book or primer, came to her shortly thereafter. Clark introduced the project with a statement explaining that she considered the piece "a reminder of the wealth of material stored in this one library and the cataloguing system that is crucial to retrieving that information; a reminder of the basics of language acquisition, the alphabet and the power of individual words; a reminder through narratives of the gift of learning and how our experiences form our understanding and evaluation of information."