The art show at the wood library

This piece was featured first on Oct 15 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

There can be a library of anything, I suppose. Mostly I think of books, but why can’t other things be slotted into this particular kind of repository?

As it turns out, UC Berkeley has a library of … wood. Yes, wood. In a room out there at the Richmond Field Station, there is a historic collection of 10,000 wood specimens that has been vital teaching aid for the wood products lab that exists there.

It turns out this kind of place has a name, a xylarium, and there are many of them around the world. This one, however, is the only one in the Bay Area. It was founded in the 1920s and eventually moved from the Berkeley campus to Richmond in 1980. There is nearly nothing on the internet about this place. Your average 19th-century Irish grandmother has left a larger paper trail!

Let me repeat: there is a room made of wood (you can see the image below) that contains thousands of wood specimens and almost no one gets to go there. Have you ever wanted to visit a place more in your life?

Well, this email brings you the extremely good news. You can go visit this rare collection starting next week, when a new art exhibit opens there called, SilviCulture trees, wood & people.

This is a group show featuring 13 artists. It’s a collaboration between UC Berkeley’s Daniel Sanchez, curator Shirley Watts, and the poet Jacqueline Simon.

Watts created Natural Discourse, which is an indescribably cool series of symposia, publications, and events. They’ve put on shows at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, the Huntington Library and more. The organization “explores the connections between art, culture, and science within the framework of botanical gardens and natural history museums.”

So, you’ll have top-notch contemporary artists presenting their work in and around the wood library. If you like beautiful wood, this will be, essentially, utopia.

The exhibit opens from 5 to 7pm on October 21, and will run from the 22nd to the 25th from 12 to 5 pm. Get there quick!

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