Janet Malcolm: Critical Collage on view in Stevenson library March 27- May 30

Opening Reception Thursday, March 27 2-4 p.m.

Janet Malcolm: Critical Collage presents the first institutional exhibition of the artist’s extensive work in collage. Best known as a critic for the New Yorker, where she wrote for over fifty years, and the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1977) and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), amongst many other books, Malcolm was also an avid collagist who made work out of a range of papers that process and reorganize themes in her writing, and which also point to the artist’s personal history. A myriad of languages appear here; psychological papers gather and fracture; the German sculptor Eva Hesse and the American poet Emily Dickinson are frequent muses. Much of this material is rendered in a visual language indebted to the historical avant-gardes, especially the work of Kurt Schwitters. Rather than insist on originality, Malcolm understood the collage method as an intimate way to assess the world in which she lived, and to use the printed page to make meaning in ways different from those typically expected of her.