Words in Place: Regionality and Text-Based Practices

This panel explores an expansive lineage of text-based works, interrogating how artistic practices that revolve around the written word are informed by place. How do artists from divergent geographies incorporate language and letterforms into their practices as a means of reflecting locality, identity, and cultural memory? From Barbara Kruger’s sans-serif proclamations and Ed Ruscha’s deadpan landscapes to Jesse Howard’s rural Missouri roadside messages and the all-but-indecipherable tradition of Philadelphia wall writing, how do artists working with text amplify localized histories, vernacular traditions, and the social realities of their communities? How have these aesthetic traditions been cultivated? Looking forward—as folk lineages meet diasporic influences—how might text-based practices propel emergent visual creolizations? With a broad focus encompassing studio-based conceptual works to activist placards carried in the streets, this panel seeks to foreground how the politics and aesthetics of language can not only be utilized to represent a place but also to actively shape its cultural and aesthetic landscape.