Wayward Signs
Wayward Signs
In Wayward Signs, artist-writers Steffani Jemison and Renee Gladman move toward the limits, edges, and excesses of language - seeking out the indeterminate places where language and visuality meet and disrupt.
FREE
Wallach Art Gallery
March 29, 2025 to April 13, 2025
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Exhibition Details

Where does black visuality meet and cross the boundaries of language? In the works on view, Gladman and Jemison address this question and more by prying open and playing with the structure of language, challenging meaning and its stability.

Calligraphic lines, glyphs, and strokes evoke and appear like writing but can’t actually be read. The visual form of language breaks; signifiers fall apart; and writing and words give way to indeterminate, incoherent, and inscrutable forms.

Additional Details

With a keen attention to drawing—and its formal relationship to writing—the two artists seek out the unruly, indeterminate places where language and visuality meet and disrupt one another.

The conceptual foundations of the exhibition emerge from and with the generative pressures which black aesthetics bears upon language, writing, and semiotics: through Gladman and Jemison’s work, Wayward Signs aims to illuminate how black commitments to improvisation, errantry, and indeterminacy erupt and interrupt the regulative constraints of linguistics, grammar, and sense-making.

Location

Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts
615 West 129th Street
New York, NY 10027

Image: Renee Gladman, Untitled, 2024. Gouache, pastel, and ink on paper. 36 x 50 in. (91.4 x 127 cm). Courtesy of the artist.