‘Rewriting the World’ exhibition opening at The Wolfsonian-FIU April 7

The Wolfsonian-FIU will present, beginning on Thursday, April 7, “Rewriting the World: Primers and Poetry in the Age of Confusion,” a new exhibition organized by curatorial research assistant Matthew Abess that will be on view through June 5 in the museum’s Rare Book and Special Collections Library Vestibule.

Drawing on the Wolfsonian’s holdings of rare books from the early 20th century, the selection of materials represents a range of attempts to define the contours of everyday life through renovations of language. Whether a motorcar marketing booklet, a literacy manual for non-native speakers, or a poem comprised of innovative typography and non-sense sounds, these works emerged from certain social and political agendas. The exhibition surveys the ways in which such agendas are inscribed in the rudiments of language – set into speech and written into thought.

The exhibition includes evangelical alphabet primers, National Socialist toothpaste pamphlets, Czech photo-texts, typographic fairytales and end-of-the-world scenarios filmed by the angel of Notre Dame.

Book, "La Fin du Monde, Filmée par l’Ange N.-D." ("The End of the World, Filmed by the Angel N.-D.") by Blaise Cendrars, 1919. Illustrated by Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955). Published by Éditions de la Sirène, Paris. The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection, 84.2.615.

“For the writers, designers and even corporations behind these works, the transformation of everyday life was something to be achieved by linguistic means, and especially by the transformation of language itself,” said Abess. “At their most effective, these efforts to initiate readers into certain visions of the present and future are well concealed. This exhibition aims to make them manifest.”

The exhibition is organized in response to the stated mission of the O, Miami poetry festival that every single person in Miami-Dade County encounter a poem during the month of April. Following this call for encounters, The Wolfsonian-FIU also will project Abeceda (2000) in its street front windows from nightfall to sunrise beginning on April 7. The film recreates the Liberated Theater’s performance of “Abeceda” – an icon of Czech avant-garde poetry, dance, and constructivist design – using the 1926 “photo-text” publication as its visual guide.

In conjunction with the exhibition and in collaboration with independent curator Brett Fletcher Lauer, the Wolfsonian also has invited five contemporary writers to contribute original postcard poems written through the themes in “Rewriting the World.” The postcards will be distributed in the museum and also will be used in O, Miami’s international call for mail art, a part of the Abe’s Penny Live installations at ArtSeen, where visitors will be sending the postcards to writers and curators internationally as well as to random addresses throughout Miami-Dade County.

For more information, contact Julieth Dabdoub at 305-535-2622 or julieth@thewolf.fiu.edu.