Being an artist’s artist is cool, but being a librarian’s artist, like Harriet Bart, is cooler.

Harriet Bart works across a wide range of mediums but one commonality among most of her art is books. She uses them as a key or footnote to a sculpture in a medium called “bricolage,” which is basically 3D collage. This badass new kind of art started with Bart’s fascination with memory. She explains that, “For more than thirty years, [she] ha[s] had a deep and abiding interest in the personal and cultural expression of memory. It is at the core of [her] work. Using bronze and stone, wood and paper, books and words, everyday and found objects, [she] seek[s] to signify a site, mark an event, and otherwise draw attention to imprints of the past as they live in the present.” Basically she has created an entirely new kind of art history (history recorded via art) that’ll be documented in art history (the regular kind) forever.

How did she think of using bookkeeping as a medium, you ask? It all happened one day when she was having trouble finishing a painting. She was getting increasingly frustrated until she just stopped and turned around. Behind her was a bookshelf and she had either an epiphany or a mental breakdown, because she pulled all of the books off of the shelf and began to rearrange them on the floor. From this (perhaps mentally unstable) moment on, books were a huge part of Bart’s art. She has published ten art books, two of which have won the Minnesota Book Artist Award and all of which are really friggin' cool.