On view are selections that reflect Whitman’s influence on contemporary artists. Crawford’s book, a contemporary illuminated manuscript, captures Whitman’s words and sensibility through images and verse that freely flows on the page. Similarly, Gilman’s art combines Whitman’s writings with her own words in a scribal manner.
The artists also employ a variety of formats: Hitchcock’s collage reconstructs a poem by Whitman with words carved out from another book. Le Fraga’s digital print of a page from Leaves of Grass is an example of erasure, where she carves out her own message from Whitman’s words.
Through form and content, these artists employ innovative methods to express Walt Whitman’s words or use those words to express their own messages.
Allen Crawford and Walt Whitman. Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself. Illustrated by Allen Crawford. Portland, OR, & Brooklyn, NY: Tin House Books, 2014.
Crawford—an artist, illustrator, designer, and writer—includes a reference to Champollion on this page of his illuminated manuscript based on Walt Whitman’s iconic work Leaves of Grass (1855).
Crawford noted about his book: “Whitman Illuminated is going to vex readers who expect the same reading experience as a typeset page because all 256 pages … are drawn by hand: every comma, every period. This was my way of keeping Whitman’s lines raw, supple, and wild. The words flow around hundreds of images. …”
Anne Gilman. this place / this hour. Brooklyn, NY: Self-published, 2019, no. 1 of an edition of 15, signed by the artist.
Accordion fold, digital prints on Arches cover stock, printed and bound by the artist.
Gilman makes large-scale drawings and artists’ books utilizing pencil, ink, graphite, and other media elements.
“I was invited to do a project commemorating the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth. My research resulted in a 27-foot scroll and this limited-edition artist book … In both projects Walt Whitman’s words, process and internal struggles are intertwined with my own. The text extracted from my work was written extemporaneously in the process of drawing the scroll.”
Meg Hitchcock, with text by Walt Whitman. Chanting the Square Deific. New York, NY: Self-published, 2014.
Unique collage. Letters cut from an old German Bible.
Artist and writer, Meg Hitchcock is interested in religion, psychology, and literature:
“This poem by Walt Whitman describes the Christian deity in its fullness: Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Satan. … the human spirit includes the shadow side of our nature; indeed, we are as much of the darkness as we are of the light. … To create the text of this poem, I cut the letters from an old German Bible, literally deconstructing the outdated theology and giving it a transcendent facelift.”
Sophia Le Fraga. Song of Me and Myself. New York, NY: Self-published, 2011, gold painted “erasures” on paper series.
Digital print of altered page from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Penguin 2005, reprint of the original 1855 edition). Image courtesy of Sophia Le Fraga.
Artist and author Le Fraga is focused on linguistics, poetry, and photography. She is the editor of No Issue on Instagram and has curated the zine Windows95. Her series of “erasure” prints is based on canonical American poetry.
”I feel like inserting my own authorship, as a woman of color, complicates and maybe even attempts to ‘queer’ the canon of literature. In keeping with that thinking, I’ve called this erasure ‘Song of Myself’.”
Artist’s statement from Center for Book Arts website.
