FATA MORGANA at the Berkeley Public Library CA
The art installation in the lobby of the Central Library is the work of artists Yulia Pinkusevich and Glenna Cole Allee. Through its illusionary play of form and space, Fata Morgana evokes the fluidity of time; its weathered and varied books represent the collective knowledge of humanity and suggest the ways in which history and personal narratives can become distorted, buried, or elevated. It invites the viewer to confront the illusory and subjective nature of time, and question the boundaries between what has been, what is, and what could be.
The installation was built with 2,000+ donated and salvaged books and assembled with the help of Authors Dinner volunteers, led by Santhi Analytis.
Yulia Pinkusevich
Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Yulia fled the eastern bloc with her family when the Soviet Union collapsed, immigrating to New York City. She came to California to earn her MFA at Stanford, and continues to live in the Bay Area. Working primarily in drawing, painting, and installation, she creates projects and large-scale environments that consider our ecological and social systems. She creates art that asks how the structures that surround us define and influence our actions, paths, and thoughts.
Her background itself is rooted in change, and her art explores dualities and the complex relationships between her blended identity and home countries. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her art is in the public collections of the deYoung Museum, Stanford University, Google HQ, and many others. She has been awarded a 2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum.
Glenna Cole Allee
Glenna is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the shifting relationships between place, myth, and memory. Her ongoing installation project, Hanford Reach, is a collaboration exploring Hanford, the Manhattan Project site in eastern Washington State. It brings together photography, sound, and video to interpret nuclear histories and the secrecy that frames those histories. Work from the project was published as a monograph by Daylight Books, Hanford Reach: In The Atomic Field and was featured in pieces on NPR and KPFA.
Glenna earned her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and her work has been shown throughout the western United States and in Australia, Italy, Japan, and many other sites. She is co-founder of the curatorial project MicroClimate Collective, which received the Alternative Exposure Grant, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts.
