Artist/Novelist

January 8–March 31, 2014
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman
Education and Research Building, MoMA Library

This exhibition presents a selection of experiments with novels from throughout the past hundred years. Early in the 20th century, modern artists illustrated canonical novels, while others conceived works of their own. In subsequent decades, artists and writers continued to integrate texts and images. In the 1960s and 1970s, a period of bold experimentation with books as an art form, practitioners engaged with conceptual, formal, and political aspects of the novel. In the 1980s, the novel became a site of critical interrogation through appropriations, “altered books,” and parodies. New fusions of image and text appeared in the graphic novels and photobooks of the 1990s. Today, artists continue to reinvent the novel, exploring the implications of digital texts, reimagining the traditional book, and playing with literary conventions.

Organized by Jennifer Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, MoMA Library

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About Old Man and Sea

In her serene interpretation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Joy Drury Cox offers a fresh understanding of time and language. By simplifying this quintessentially American tome to its most basic construction, Old Man and Sea evokes the literal and metaphorical elements of the trace.
Honoring the original form of Hemingway’s novel, Cox has replicated the exact dimensions of her own well-worn paperback edition. Using Hemingway’s periods as a guide, Cox creates new patterns and possibilities for understanding his familiar language. Admittedly this new reading of the work is at first primarily visual. Though, by preserving only the pauses and allowing us to make the journey between them, our sense of Hemingway’s pace enters a new dimension.

There are a very limited number of copies of Old Man and Sea available at conveyoreditions.com.