Room 26 Discrete Notions Exhibition Series (See also: Room 26 Discrete Notions — Appendix)
ABOUT: Inspired by Simon Cutts’s speculative Museum of the Individual Book, the Room 26 Discrete Notions postcard series documents the frequently-changing, semi-private installation of single artworks, objects, and texts in my office (Room 26, Beinecke Library). Beginning in 2004, this project has featured more than 120 made and found artworks, commentaries, cultural documents, and literary and artistic records. It has also included personal obsessions, inside jokes, and secret communications. The exhibited materials may observe, celebrate, critique, lampoon, and document cultural phenomena, but their selection is based on my experience—here I have gathered some things I find beautiful, moving, funny, compelling, usefully confounding. Through the post, I shared these Discrete Notions with some 50 beloved friends and admired strangers, many of whom have become series contributors, guest curators, and advisors. Though the exhibitions themselves take place at a kind of remove, the postcards are a more public project, drawn from a community of writers, artists, editors, and thinkers, broadcast and rebroadcast as they travel to new exhibition sites on desks, mantels, refrigerators. I am grateful to all my Discrete Notions collaborators, but the project owes a special debt to my room 26 officemate, Timothy G. Young, and my partner-in-all-things, Richard Deming.
-- Nancy Kuhl