Department of Transformation: Letters for the Future
November 03, 2025 to January 25, 2026 curated by Department of Transformation (DOT) in collaboration with BPL Presents
Brooklyn Central Library, Grand Lobby
10 Grand Army Plz 1st floor, Brooklyn, NY 11238
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Abäke, Alysha Naples, Andrew Samuel Harrison, Asad Raza, Ashleigh Abbott, Athena Kokoronis, Be Oakley / GenderFail Press, Blair Simmons, Demian DinéYazhi', Dexter Sinister, Emeka Ogboh, Erik White, Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Hilma’s Ghost, Ilana Harris-Babou, Infected Lexicon of Language, James Kusel, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers, Katie Holten, Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Lize Mogel, Mark Foss, Monica Bonvicini & Sam Durant, outgoing, Prem Krishnamurthy, Qasim Naqvi, Rick Griffith, Shanzhai Lyric, Sharmistha Ray, Tamar Halpern, Tamara Sussman, Timmy Simonds, Tré Seals + Civilization, William Dilworth, Zoe Pettijohn Schade, and others.
Letters for the Future is an exhibition and series of experimental public programs curated by Department of Transformation (DOT) in collaboration with BPL Presents, the Library's Arts and Culture team. Across media and modes, the project focuses on transformative formats for reading, writing, speaking, and thinking together.
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Letters for the Future celebrates the library as one of the few remaining intellectual, creative, and civic commons still freely available. The show spotlights works across media and modes—paintings, videos, sculptures, performances, works on paper, books and zines—that consider text and image relationships, distribution, and participation in unexpected ways. In tandem with the exhibition, a range of artists, designers, educators and activists will host a series of experimental public programs that aim to deepen BPL’s role as a site of social learning and community building.
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Embracing an open-source ethos to share conceptual and aesthetic “tools” for public library-goers, Letters for the Future positions art and design—and the forms of collectivity, learning, healing, and resistance they can engender—as powerful agents of transformation. At a moment when rapidly advancing communication and intelligence technologies are destabilizing existing categories of authorship and systems of circulation, Letters for the Future starts from a shared curiosity about the evolution of language and text as both artistic subject and material. With an eye towards providing maximum access and provoking exploration of our ever-changing technological and political world, the exhibition and accompanying programs seek to reframe how we envision collective futures.
As part of this collaboration, Letters for the Future invites BPL cardholders to borrow a selection of works by the artists and collectives in the exhibition for a three-week period. In launching this special, borrowable art collection, BPL and DOT offer a simple, but radical, proposal: that art should be available to all, to live with and learn from every day
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Embracing an open-source ethos to share conceptual and aesthetic “tools” for public library-goers, Letters for the Future positions art and design—and the forms of collectivity, learning, healing, and resistance they can engender—as powerful agents of transformation. At a moment when rapidly advancing communication and intelligence technologies are destabilizing existing categories of authorship and systems of circulation, Letters for the Future starts from a shared curiosity about the evolution of language and text as both artistic subject and material. With an eye towards providing maximum access and provoking exploration of our ever-changing technological and political world, the exhibition and accompanying programs seek to reframe how we envision collective futures.
As part of this collaboration, Letters for the Future invites BPL cardholders to borrow a selection of works by the artists and collectives in the exhibition for a three-week period. In launching this special, borrowable art collection, BPL and DOT offer a simple, but radical, proposal: that art should be available to all, to live with and learn from every day