“Regard a mighty tree, and you will discern that it is none other than an upright river pouring into the air of the sky.”

— Paul Valéry, “Poems in the Rough”

Words and images have always had an antagonistic relationship with one another, chipping away at the singular claims to truth of each medium and producing a friction between what is seen and what is described, imagined, or projected. The two paths of signification are also deeply intertwined: images are chastened by their captions, textual encyclopedias are filled with illustrations and visual diagrams, newspapers are peppered with documentary photographs. The exchange between the two often serves to narrow down a description to its precise intent; however, artists and poets have worked against the impulse to simplify and explicate, combining text and imagery in contradictory and expansive elisions of meaning, wresting new ideas from the intersection of visual typography, lyric imaginaries, and the misunderstandings of one system of meaning merging with another.

Throughout the history of arts and letters, the flux of image and language coalesced in various movements, from the visual poetics termed “calligrammes” by the French Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire to the concrete textuality of the Noigandres movement in Brazil and the rhythmic graphics of Soviet artist El Lissitzky’s publication designs. A similar impulse to transgress the boundary of poetry and painting arises in the epistolary abstraction of Cy Twombly’s gestural scrawl or in Hanne Darboven’s diaristic repetitions of simple handwriting loops. stanley brouwn’s iconoclastic works of conceptual art like walking through cosmic rays (1970–2009) consist entirely of a poetic idea described in a caption-like wall text that activates the empty space of the gallery, thus reducing the work of art to something very much akin to a poem.

This exhibition departs from the Surrealist practice of the poème-objet, the dream-based assemblages constructed from scraps of text and found objects by André Breton between 1924 and the 1940s. Poem objects were later picked up by modernist poets and artists of the neo-concrete movement including Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica who brought poetry into contact with materiality and relational aesthetics. Word Pictures and Poem Objects asks how these modernist poetics might be reimagined today — to plunge into the space of a poem, uncover beauty in the ligatures, serifs, and graphic strokes of typographic design, find revelation in mundane constructions of paper and ink, or encode mysteries within the compositional space of a drawing, a sculpture, or an artist book.

We are seeking submissions for works at the intersection of visual art and poetry. In addition to artists of the visual variety, the exhibition is open to writers who create visual documents like concrete poetry and illustrated texts, as well as other interdisciplinary performers whose practices have a visual dimension (i.e. a score, sketch, diagram, or set of visual instructions). We welcome practitioners who engage the blurred line(s) between mediums.