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County Collection

Acton/Agua Dulce Library

Frontier

Photos by: Patrick McElhenney | Click for larger photos

Project Description

The 11,000 sq. ft. Acton/Agua Dulce Library offers reading and storytelling areas; book stacks; circulation and information desks; a children’s area with a storytelling space; meeting and study rooms; a homework center; computer stations; and a store for the Friends of the Library. A creek runs under the building and the north side frames stunning mountain views to the north.

Anne Marie Karlsen’s series of large porcelain enamel discs with vibrant colors and patterns are composed from local photographic imagery. The designs appear abstract from a distance, but upon closer examination, reveal the history of the community. The discs thread through a quote from American inventor and researcher Charles F. Kettering, “Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier…”

See Anne Marie Karlsen, Lawndale Library

About the Artist

Anne Marie Karlsen earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin, and has been teaching art in southern California since 1979 at UCLA, and currently at Santa Monica College.  Since 1990 she has been commissioned for numerous public projects throughout the country, including the FBI Headquarters in Chicago; Paseo Colorado Development in Pasadena; North Hollywood Metro Red Line station; and Trailside Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska.  In 2008, her artwork for Lawndale Library, titled Subdivisions, was among forty works cited as “one of the most exemplary, innovative permanent or temporary public art works created or debuted in 2008” by the Americans for the Arts.  Her work is also represented in many museums throughout California and the U.S., and internationally in the Kulturverwaltung Stadt in Salzburg, Austria.