New Yorkers can now trade in their red public library cards for a special edition honoring the centennial of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
Designed by the New York Public Library (NYPL) and the Brooklyn-based studio Morcos Key, the limited-edition library card features the late sculptor Houston Conwill’s 1991 “Rivers,” a terrazzo art installation at the Schomburg under which the poet Langston Hughes’s ashes are interred. Conwill’s cosmogram nods to Hughes’s 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” first published in the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in which the poet proclaimed, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
The cards will be available at all NYPL locations while in stock as the Schomburg kicks off a year-long series of programming celebrating its centenary. Last Thursday, May 8, the center debuted the cards in conjunction with the opening of 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity, which includes an inscribed copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, gifted personally from the author to Schomburg.
“Rivers” is both a memorial to Hughes and to the center’s namesake, the Puerto Rico-born scholar and prolific collector of Black history and literature, Arturo Schomburg. In 1940, the NYPL renamed its division for Black history, literature, and prints after Schomburg, from whom the library acquired thousands of artifacts, including manuscripts and volumes related to Black literature, art, the Harlem Renaissance, narratives of enslaved people, and diasporic history.
On the floor of the Schomburg’s Langston Hughes Lobby, lines from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” populate the copper-colored cosmogram, encircled by a blue band bearing the names of the Mississippi, Congo, Nile, and Euphrates rivers, all of which Hughes conjures in his poem. Blue lines flow out of the cosmogram in four directions, extending across the lobby floor. On the Schomburg’s special-edition library card, a version of the artwork peeks through one of the zeroes in “100.”
Conwill, who died in 2016, designed another cosmogram connecting waterways to freedom struggles entitled “The Freedom Ring” (1994) at the Community College of Philadelphia. The New York City Art Commission awarded the sculptor the design contract for the Schomburg’s lobby in 1990.
Kinshasha Holman Conwill, director emerita of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, told Hyperallergic in a statement that “Rivers” was her late husband’s favorite commission.
“His love for Langston Hughes, the legacy of Arturo Schomburg, and Harlem itself were met in the creation of Rivers,” Holman Conwill said. “Knowing that it is a library card animates and magnifies even further his love of all things Schomburg and its patrons — the people of New York, his favorite city.”
In a statement to Hyperallergic, Schomburg Center Director Joy Bivins described the cosmogram as the “heart” of the center and as a “beloved gathering place, a public work of art, [and] a space for reflection.”
“We could think of no better image for the special-edition Centennial library card. People from across the globe visit us to view it and marvel at the fact that they can pay their respects to our namesake and the ‘poet laureate of Harlem,’” Bivins continued. “This library card allows every patron to hold a piece of Schomburg’s history in their pocket.”