From 2019 to 2023, Nox Library ran as an experimental literature distribution and knowledge sharing project. We hosted book exchanges, reading groups, newsletters, and more while simultaneously raising funds to support our free literature distribution efforts. While not-for-profit, we never established ourselves as a non-profit—this enabled us to keep our political stances clear and our anti-capitalist principles uncompromising. In our formative years we emerged as a mutual-aid resource in response to the growing need for political education and action.
In the years that followed, numerous grassroots organizations also sprung up for community support and political organizing in Detroit. It’s these organizations we now encourage our community to follow, support, and participate in while we take a step back from our free literature distributions and mutual aid efforts.
The challenge presented by sustaining the funds and capacity required for these efforts put us in a position to re-think our focus, and we feel Nox Library is no longer the right project to fill in the gap for political action and community organizing—we see the unity of our friends, neighbors, and co-workers doing just that, and it’s important that we support them in every way possible.
Nox Library has always anchored itself in things that encourage collectivism, political education, unity and revolutionary change. These principles were emphasized at Nox Library’s first pop-up at an art show in 2019, where we established our focus on the intersection of art and politics. Our values remain the same, and we are bringing our purpose back to its roots with the exploration of a central question we’ve held from the start: what is art’s role in making a better world possible?
We’re excited to make ourselves a community once again for everyone who wants to explore this question. We look forward to inviting artists, designers, and community organizers for interviews and writings—and our community to study groups and book exchanges—to build an art-centered political education and archive in Detroit, online, and in-print.