Art=Text=Art: Private Languages / Public Systems has been re-curated for UB Anderson Gallery by graduate students Sarah JM Kolberg, Cat Dawson, and Maddie Phinney, under the direction of Jonathan D. Katz, Director of the Doctoral Program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. This new presentation explores the advent of language in the visual arts in post-war America and the simultaneous emergence of concrete poetry. These practices embraced language’s ability to carry multiple, even contradictory meanings, thus creating a space for individual acts of anti-conformist thought. Through words in art, flirtations with ideas unauthorized by then-dominant socio-political realities were allowed expression, especially among an early generation of LGBTQ artists.

Exhibition Checklist

Art=Text=Art was first organized in 2011 by the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, and was curated by N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director & Curator of Exhibition, University Museums, with Rachel Nackman, Curator, Kramarsky Collection. It has since traveled to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2012), and Hafnarborg, The Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Iceland, as part of the Reykjavík Arts Festival (2013).

The artworks in its current installation are drawn largely from the Sally & Wynn Kramarsky Collection, with additional loans from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, and the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo.