The Dreams of Sentences

The Dreams of Sentences

Eleven years ago, artist and writer Renee Gladman began doing a kind of writing that was in fact drawing, which soon became a practice unto itself. Join her for an experiential talk that visits places along a spectrum of thought where sentences become drawings, drawn lines orchestrate sound, and music articulates the unknown.

A conversation moderated by Safia Siad follows the artist talk.

Biography

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous books, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). My Lesbian Novel, a work of fiction and autobiography, is forthcoming in fall 2024. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Since 2017, Gladman has exhibited her works on paper in galleries in the U.S. and across Europe. Her first solo show “The Dreams of Sentences” opened at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery in September 2022, followed by “Narratives of Magnitude” at Artists Space in 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

Safia Siad is an independent curator, scholar, and DJ with a practice centered in deep listening, unlearning, fugitive collaboration, and opaque movement(s). She is currently completing her MA in Art History at Concordia University and is curator and project manager with the Afrosonic Innovation Lab.

Curated by Nasrin Himada, Associate Curator of Academic Outreach and Community Engagement