AiR Honey Simone: Announcing the Carolina Record Shop

Honey Simone in front of the Carolina Record Shop installation a few days before opening

holy shit, it’s been an entire year since my last post.

I am both relieved & excited to catch everyone up on my process over the past year since I began my art residency with Engaging Collections in partnership with Buncombe County Special Collections.

So for those of you who are just now finding out about this project & don’t have reference points let me break down a few things so we can be on the same page. So don’t worry if you are like...wtf is special collections, I didn’t know either!

The Buncombe County Special Collections (BCSC) (formerly the North Carolina Room) is a medium-sized archival facility located on the lower level of Pack Memorial Library in downtown Asheville. BCSC specializes in the social, cultural, and natural history of Asheville, Buncombe County, and Western North Carolina.

&& the intention of Engaging Collections is to facilitate artists through funding, resources, and advocacy in the making of public artworks which address underrepresented histories, non-dominant narratives, and community-based legacies.

or in my words to “say fuck you to system & share & highlight stories of bipoc that’s not based solely in trauma… && peel back the sticky layers of the white narrative that dominates archives & history spaces because we all know we were not told the whole story.”

Sorry to everyone who thought they were gonna be reading an a typical academic journal post… I like to keep things direct & honest. :)

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so what have we been working on?

When we first started the project the idea was that I was going to have a section of the room for my installation but after a long discussion of equity & progression we decided the whole room could use some freshening up so we did it. To be invited to start to dismantle some of the old infrastures & usher in changes in this space to make it welcoming & comfortable was an honor.

Pack Memorial library was built in the 1970’s & had certain architectural limitations, so we decided to work with what we had & lean into the 70’s aesthetics which is a personal favorite of mine & many.

we started with drawing up a concept which included some cosmetic changes like:

++ painting the walls

++ rearranging furniture

++ custom built “record shop” shelving designed by Nicholas Falduto and built by Eli Blasko

++ ordering a couch, a few chairs & a pouf

++ adding some plants (they had to be fake bc archival materials and books can’t be around moisture or the rick of pests.. shoutout to palm + pine)

now let’s talk about the impact changes:

++ we said a big fuck you to the Dewey Decimal system! … which if you didn’t know Dewey was a huge racist so I’ll let you imagine how he thought books about BIPOC should be sorted…

Katherine, Kathy & their team spent countless hours weeding through books & arranging them to make intuitive sense to someone who just strolled in off the street. So we could remove the barrier of the haunting feeling of academia which for me was needed bc I had to work through that emotion a lot at the beginning

++ all books written by racists or that promote racist narratives were separated into into a section called “Literature of Prejudice”

++ making more clear & accessible wayfinding to navigate the room

++ we dug for hours through newspaper clippings, books, digital collections to bring forward the stories of Black Asheville

Katherine, BCSC staff, and our research fellow Lum worked on a huge timeline of the region’s history, uplifting BIPOC narratives alongside well-known histories, 10,000 BCE to 1999. It will go on the far wall of BCSC and evolve over time.

Like I said before but I will say it again—the history we know is not the full truth so if we are not seeking the truth we are complicit.

Now I could write for hours about all the changes in the room but the whole entire point of spending a year of working on it was to invite you into the Carolina Record Shop to experience it for yourself!

I’ll be back to write more about my experience & share some more photos of the process, but please come & join us for our opening to celebrate!