Picture This: Using Racist Books As Art

What do you do with 4,100 books full of racist nonsense? One solution is to turn them into something that can hang on a museum wall.

That’s how some folks in Montana created “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate [2].” The story of this unusual art exhibit begins in 2003, when the Montana Human Rights Network landed a small library of white supremacist literature. The books came from a disaffected member of a group called the Church of the Creator (or Creativity Movement) in Montana. For about $300, he led the Network to a storage unit that contained thousands of copies of 13 books. Among them were racist and anti-Semitic volumes with titles like The White Man’s Bible and Nature’s Eternal Religion.

The white supremacists buying these books at $10 a pop were not just harmless cranks. A Washington member of the “Church” firebombed an NAACP office. Another member was arrested for planting a bomb in Maryland. In 1991, a Florida “Reverend” murdered a black Gulf War veteran named Harold Mansfield. That case led the Southern Poverty Law Center to win a $1 million default judgment against the group.

The Montana Human Rights Network deprived the Church of the Creator of its books – and any profit from them. But this coup led to a big question. What do you do with the books? Burning or shredding them wasn’t the Network’s style. So it turned to the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Mont., with the idea of transforming them into art. The resulting exhibit, which has been touring Montana since 2008, features 60 pieces contributed by artists from around the country. They include a 10-by-10-foot house (made out of nearly 3,000 books) entitled “Hate Begins at Home.”

So far, “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate” has played only at Montana venues. They include several small towns of 10,000 or so. But in some cases, those towns also had active white supremacist groups. Carl Deitchman, the Holter’s executive director, says the museum would like to bring the exhibit before a national audience. “It helps [people] to get in touch with that deep-rooted prejudice and that fear of the ‘other’ that resides beneath the surface and erupts so easily,” he said.