For the first iteration of our ADAA Member Viewing Room, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents works by our gallery artists that engage with written language in a variety of manners. The viewing room opens with Kay Rosen's video SISYPHUS. Created in 1991 for the exhibition Candyass Carnival at Stux Gallery, Rosen misspells Sisyphus in seventy different ways, never revealing the correct version. Each failed iteration is another expression of futility; a specific form of language that remains independent of and inaccessible to artist and viewer. Rosen, who has focused on language-based art since 1968, has described her role as that of a cognitive observer, presenting language as a form of found material that transforms itself through minimal intervention. Using this as a starting point, we have selected a sample of works by other gallery-represented artists who have utilized language as a found material.
Text features prominently in Jeffrey Gibson's multimedia practice. His paintings, prints, textiles, garments, and popular series of punching bags incorporate lyrics from popular music sources. Synthesizing the cultural and artistic traditions of his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage with themes from contemporary popular and queer culture, Gibson's work invokes utilizes familiar expressions of language as a call for individual strength, and collective empowerment across communities.
For her 2010 drawing, Nina Simone, Kara Walker prints a quote from The Times' 2003 obituary of Simone, describing the singer's "troubled personal life" of suffering, miscarriages, and relationships with "powerful and often violent men." By isolating and reprinting the text, in a distinctly bold, handmade typeset, Walker asks us to consider how misogynistic, objectifying language circulates and shapes public narratives of Black women.
Marlene McCarty similarly borrows from media sources in her works from the early 90s. Here, misogynistic and profane language—typically tools of patriarchal power and dehumanization—are undercut by the methods of their production: heat transfer using an iron, associated with so-called "women's work."
Whereas Gibson, Walker, and McCarty chose the textual representation of appropriated language, in the works by Mitch Epstein, Josephine Halvorson, and Vik Muniz written text is presented as integrated into the natural and material world: Epstein in his photographs of a message board in the border town of Bisbee, Arizona; Halvorson in her painting of a permit sign posted on a birch tree on near her property in Western Massachusetts; and Muniz in his exacting multi-media replication of the back of a New York Times press photo of Leon Trotsky. By reproducing text as it was originally found, these artists highlight the use of language within specific moments of space and history.
Lastly, Arturo Herrera utilizes the physical carriers of language, books sourced from flea markets, in his series of small mixed media paintings. Rendered useless in terms of their original purpose, the books explore the tension between abstraction and legibility. Words and language are defamiliarized against thick brushstrokes and collaged elements, resulting in a new, hybrid image of paint and text.

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