The Borrowers

From the fourth floor of the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in West Seattle, three artists are quietly upsetting the natural order of the professional art world.

Photography by Scott Squire

Cassie with Paul Goldstein’s Cedar Woman: Waiting for the Tide to Change, 2005.
“This is Cassie. Her mom lets her check out all the work herself. I love going over to her house. She’s just bouncing off the walls and so excited to have something new come into the house.” — Seth Damm, Art Lending Librarian

Flynn Bickley, Gina Coffman and Seth Damm run the Art Lending Library, which brings original artwork — from sculpture to paintings to drawings to books — into people’s homes. Anyone can join; the price of membership is the time it takes to provide the librarians with basic contact information, have your picture taken and wait for your library card to be laminated. There are no fees, no background checks, no catch, no small print whatsoever.

About as often as the seasons change, the ALL librarians display their entire collection for one night in a spare classroom at Youngstown in an event much like a gallery show. Dressed in blue T-shirts with “Shhh” spelled across the front, they open their doors to their diverse library membership, which includes college students from the University of Washington, residents of Tacoma and Kent, one person looking for something to hang in his cubicle, children, teenagers and grandparents. Each arrives, library card in hand, to peruse the collection, socialize and, literally, check art out.

Joel with Koji Kubota’s 3 Signs, 2002.
Photo documentation, a major part of the Art Lending Library’s artistic mission, is led by Scott Squire, a professional photographer who calls himself a “lay anthropologist.” Squire is a resident of Cooper, where he acts as co-director of NonFiction Media with his wife, Amy Benson.

Bickley, Coffman and Damm met four years ago when they moved into the upper floors of the Youngstown building as participants in the Cooper Resident Artists program. All three work in a variety of media (performance, paint, print, embroidery) on top of their day jobs: Damm is a self-employed carpenter, Coffman works for SDOT and Bickley works at Second Use, a building supply store. As their friendship grew, the artists discovered a common desire to reach out to their community through art. The means, however, were not apparent.

Then one day, Damm visited the Seattle Art Museum. “I was wandering around looking at Pollocks, and I thought, ‘What would it be like to have a Pollock in my house — or another work by someone I looked up to, like a de Kooning.” That day, Damm decided he couldn’t accept that only people who can afford it get to have art in their home.

Jill with Liv Browning’s Rescue of Mickey (1–4), 2008.
“This was the first piece Jill checked out. I love this photo. She showed up to the party the other day — we hadn’t seen her in a year probably. When one day is all you have for a show, sometimes people just can’t make it.” —S.D.

When Damm presented the idea of raiding friends’ art storage lockers and loaning art to people so they could have a closer, more intimate experience with it, Coffman and Bickley were immediately on board. And other artists living in Cooper were happy to donate work. Bickley fished an old school library card catalog out of a dumpster, and the trio enlisted the help of a library science expert to create a well-organized system that is, surprisingly, entirely free of computers.

The Art Lending Library must ensure the safety of the works of art. So after the paintings, prints and sculptures have been selected, the librarians personally deliver and install each piece, sometimes busing art across the city, because none of the librarians owns a car.

Instead of being mounted on crisp white walls over concrete floors, works from the ALL end up clashing with and complementing a variety of pale and bright wall colors, surrounded by a variety of furniture styles, people, laundry, sunlight and life in general, all of which forces the art into a new context that, perhaps, the artist would never have imagined.

When the “due date” approaches and it is time to return the artwork, the librarians arrive again to reclaim it. This is hard for some members, Bickley says: “A lot of people really lament the departure.”

“Some leave the screw in the wall,” adds Damm. “That’s how they remember that they need to come back. It’s different from what people might experience with TV or other media where you’re used to sort of putting in the next DVD. Art has a different weight to it.”

Zoe with Anna Callahan’s Conversations in Rockville, 2002.
“Zoe is a huge supporter. She talks about ALL with her friends all the time. They don’t quite understand it.” says Seth.  Later he offers the perfect answer: “Recently, we put a piece in and the two women said that they had designed their house all the same color, all grey. They thought that would help them when they came home to just nest. But they were starting to get kind of tired of the monotony of it. So we brought in this piece that they had picked with this giant glowing orange orb in the middle of it. I could just feel the energy of the room changing as we brought it in. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen when we have to take it back. You can get a tangible feeling for the influence that this painting is going to have. I don’t think I’ve ever had that experience with artwork from showing it in the gallery.”

Susan with Amy Snyder’s Flowers, 2007.
“Susan teaches disabled kids; she hung this artwork in her classroom and used it for several lessons.” — Gina Coffman, Art Lending Librarian

Francesca and her daughter with Joan Swearingen’s Assembling from Memory Nos 1 & 3, 2004.

Joan Swearingen’s Assembling from Memory, No. 5, 2004, in the home of Cidnee (not pictured).
“We’ve had some funny experiences with college students where you show up at their dorm room and they don’t have any wall space. The guy has just woken up; it’s two in the afternoon. He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, right.’ And he’s got a hamper with clothes overflowing and there’s a little spot and you’re just like, I guess we hang it there? Or single moms, who are just kind of embarrassed. Sometimes people don’t want to be in the pictures. But it’s amazing for us to be invited in. It’s all because of art — I think there is a certain power to artwork where it opens doors.” —S.D.