The Scent Lending Library

Donna Lipowitz

Permanent Installation at Olfactory Art Keller

25A Henry Street, New York 10002, NY

Opening Reception on Saturday April 12th from 4pm to 6pm

Olfactory Art Keller is honored to present the world’s first public Scent Lending Library, an intimate, immersive installation by Donna Lipowitz that invites visitors to borrow and return smells. Lipowitz applies the concept of a library as a shared, circulating collection for study and borrowing to scents.

One hundred scents form the library’s reference collection that can be explored in the small smelling room at Olfactory Art Keller. Half of the scents are also available to be checked out, so library members can take them home for further study.

The collection is eclectic and proudly incomplete, including fragrance molecules alongside commercial fragrances and scents created by the artist. The project is rooted in Lipowitz’s belief that scent is a powerful yet often overlooked medium. A former props master and set decorator in film and television, she has long been drawn to stories set in everyday life. Her work explores how scent - unlike image, can bypass conscious bias and tap directly into memory, emotion, and place.

 “Aged six or so,” she writes, “I built a small library for my books outside, in the humid, damp Australian rainforest, from sticks. I’d sit ‘inside,’ lost in faraway worlds.” The Scent Lending Library continues that instinct, offering people a way to step into new or forgotten inner worlds through smell.

The Scent Lending Library invites visitors into a volatile archive. One based not on ownership and completeness, but on impermanence, sensation, and exchange.

(Membership in the Scent Lending Library is open to everyone and free. Members can check out up to three scents at a time.)