Oakland, CA–September 28, 2009. Today Mills College art history professor Moira Roth teams up with Pauline Oliveros and others for The Library of Maps: an Opera in Many Parts, an evening of storytelling, sounds, and dance at the Firehouse North gallery in Berkeley, CA.

The centerpiece of the event is Library of Maps, a collection of poems, written by Roth with photos by Dennis Letbetter, music by Oliveros, small drawings by Slobodan Dan Paich, and a performance by his theater group, the Artship Ensemble. Other items include stones and a weaving.

Roth began the Library of Maps as an ongoing series in 2001, which currently has grown to 41 texts about an imaginary library, its contents, inhabitants and history. The narrative starts from the beginning to the end of time, and is set in both real and imaginary spaces, such as from Hiroshima to the Land of the Star Dwellers.

Among the 15 types of characters are the Chief Librarian, the Hermit, and the Cartographer.

The collaboration with other artists developed when Roth first met Paich, a theater director and native of Serbia, in May 2008, and they began exchanging images and texts.

“He sends me jpegs, always accompanied by poetic titles, of images—mostly drawings created that day during his regular visits to the Samovar café near the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,” she said. “I quickly weave these into short narratives. Sometimes we give the image-texts as presents to friends. Other times it is an exchange just between ourselves.

“We found that Paich’s art works have had amazingly magical and surprising parallels to the imagery and references in my Library of Maps narrative,” Roth said, so she and Paich matched a selection of some of his 90 small drawings with three of her Library of Maps texts: The Map of the Heart (2001), The Unruly Map of Threads (2001), and The Map of Stones (2003).

Roth also discovered that many of her friends collected stones, so a small display of stones from various parts of the world were added to the exhibition.

The Library of Maps exhibition was first shown at the Bonnafont Gallery in San Francisco earlier this year and will travel to the University of California in Santa Cruz in January 2010 and may exhibit in Europe afterwards.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 950 undergraduate women and 550 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College is named one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report, and ranks as one of the Best 371 Colleges by the Princeton Review. Forbes.com ranked Mills 55th among America's best colleges and named it a "Top Ten: Best of the All-Women's Colleges." Visit us at www.mills.edu.

PRESS CONTACT:
Quynh Tran
Media Relations Manager
510.430.2300