Emilie Menzel

Visualizing Language was a gallery conceptualized and created as a 24-hour pop-up exhibition for the 2018 and 2019 Juniper Literary Festivals at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Curated by Emilie Menzel in 2019 and Emilie Menzel and Amanda Dahill-Moore in 2018, the gallery explored intersections between the visual arts and the written word through a presentation of writing and artwork by current University of Massachusetts MFA Fiction & Poetry candidates.

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Writers and visual artists of course hold a long history of lively exchange: Ezra Pound’s cantos painted brightly across Cy Twombly’s canvases; Guillaume Apollinaire, Hilton Als, Eileen Myles, and John Ashbery the renowned art critics and writers; Fred Moten and Tyehimba Jess’ explorations of the page's white space; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new adaptation of the comic book Black Panther; Alison Bechdel’s strange family introspections through the graphic novel; Lynda Barry’s teaching of writing through journaling and doodles; Renee Gladman’s subtly beautiful examinations of language as architecture and writing as drawing; ekphrastics, theater, film, cartoons, picture books—the list continues.

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The displayed works at Visualizing Language examined the relationship between visual artwork and writing through a range of approaches:

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1.Writing presented as traditional visual art—the poem body as art object, the paragraph as shape; 2. Writing and the visual presented in combination—graphic design, collage, word and image juxtaposition; 3. Artwork by writers who are simultaneously visual artists, who use the visual as a way of exploring and expanding their writing practices; and 4. Photographs of writers' work spaces, samples of writers’ object collections, physical objects which spur writing activity—the visual worlds writers build for themselves to sustain creativity.

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Photographs Below by Mike Medeiros