Allen Ginsberg Chairperson Alice Neel at the National Museum of Women in the Arts Artists Fear Renovation Will Destroy Soul of Historic Chelsea Hotel 'Leaves of Grass' Celebrated at Yale

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Virginia Woolf called writing an exploration. Franz Kafka called it a prayer—an invocation that would exile him from one reality and give him sanctuary in another.

Inspired by the transformative nature of the writing process, Alice Attie creates drawings composed of words found in literature by which she has been inspired and challenged. Her application of ink is shaped into letters, grouped into words, building the physical structure of the drawing directly related to the life of the text.

The details in the works appear to be constructed out of thousands of tiny particles, but the many letters become clear upon closer examination, challenging the viewer to see the significance of each bit’s contribution to the whole.

Attie’s drawing of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass resembles layers of flowing blades in tiers, bending in the wind. A work inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl revolves in a global fashion with mixed empty space and density that recalls the cadence of reading.

Although the works are generated by texts, they seek to re-invent the modalities we have come to call languages. The drawing page becomes a place that mediates between written words and the lines that draw them—a place where the fragile distinction between writing and drawing takes hold.