Q&A with Chapel Hill Public Library's Daniel Siler

The Chapel Hill Public Library is celebrating Banned Books Week (Sept. 24 – Sept. 30) by having its yearly banned books trading card contest, which invites local artists to create works inspired by a banned book or author. 

Staff writer Connie Hanzhang Jin sat down with Daniel Siler, Chapel Hill Public Library’s marketing and communications manager, to talk about the contest. 

The Daily Tar Heel: Can you talk about how this event got started and what it’s about? 

Daniel Siler: The Banned Books Trading Card Project dates back to a time when the Chapel Hill Public Library director Susan Brown was in her previous library in Lawrence, Kansas. The project originated there and she brought it with her to Chapel Hill when she became the director here at the library. The trading cards project basically engages the local art community for a very specific goal, which is to celebrate the freedom to read and warn about the dangers of censorship, while at the same time stimulating the local arts community and really pulling people together in a unique way. So we like to think that we’re celebrating the arts and writing and reading itself. 

DTH: So who judges the entries that come in? 

DS: This project is a partnership with the Chapel Hill Public and Cultural Arts office. So our friends at Cultural Arts work with us to pull together a jury of five people that usually consists of the library director, in this case Susan Brown; the mayor, which will be Pam Hemminger this year; a member of the public arts commission; and then one or two artsy or literary folks who are from the area. This year I believe that’s going to be author Daniel Wallace. So we get the five folks together after we receive all of the different submissions and then they look over the pieces and as far as how we judge them, it’s really less about – well, it’s really about the quality of the art, mostly; what would make a good trading card, what’s an evocative piece, a piece of art that stands on its own merit. 

DTH: Has participation in this contest grown over the past couple years? 

DS: Participation has definitely grown. When it first started – this is its fifth year now – so in its first year there were about 50, maybe 45 entries. Then we saw it climb steadily. I think last year we had more than a hundred. So this year, since it's open to five different counties, which are Orange, Durham, Wake, Chatham and Alamance, we got a lot of different people who are in that footprint of places and a lot of creative people who enjoy celebrating the freedom to read and also making art. And it’s from a variety of different people. So we see families who do this as a project, where Mom and Dad and the kids will also each submit a piece, but we also see full-time artists who bring in their work. We are very lucky that we have a very high-quality pool of art to pull from. 

DTH: Since you’ve mentioned different skill levels and ages coming in, are there different categories for the art that you can submit? 

DS: We do have an under-18 category. We do seven cards in total, with seven winners. So originally this was thought out for Banned Books Week, so we unveil one card during each day. The sets are available to people; we give them out for free during the actual week, so you can come and get a full set of cards, but we do an unveiling that sort of highlights that particular work or author on the day it’s unveiled. But as far as categories go, it’s really wide open. We’re mostly curious to see how the community chooses to represent the work that they’ve been looking at. Unfortunately, there is such a high number of books that are challenged in libraries and schools across the country each year that there is a lot of different work that we see. It might have been two years ago, one of the winning cards was of a piece that was "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. The book focuses on black nationalism and Marxism, and it won a national book award. The piece that won was mixed media and the image itself was made up of all of the newspaper headlines from Ferguson and Officer Darren Wilson. So it tends to be topical, but at the same time the jury is the one that actually gets to make the determination for which one is the winner for this particular year. 

DTH: You’ve mentioned some past entries, but do you have any favorite entries from the past couple of years? 

DS: I think there was one done last year – I think the artist's name is Libby Fosso – it was "Where’s Waldo." It was the simplest card, just red and white and red and white and a pair of eyes that were poking out of it. I liked it for its simplicity and also because it was a fantastic conversation starter. Most people don’t know that "Where’s Waldo" has in fact been challenged and folks tried to keep it off the shelves of a school in the seventies. And that’s what this contest is really all about. It is about making interesting art, but even more so it’s about starting conversations about how books are challenged and how we as a community really need to continue to just – we have the freedom to read what we want. 

The deadline for the contest was Aug. 28, but it is now pushed to Sept. 5, giving artists an extra week to work on their pieces. 

arts@dailytarheel.com