What Happens When Text and Visual Art Collide on SMU’s Campus?

Friends of the program know how much I enjoy Michael Corris’ Free Museum of Dallas, the institution he launched in the empty room behind his office at Southern Methodist University. The museum / conceptual project is opening its second exhibition this Friday, Matthew Cusick- Defacements: A Collection of Altered Book Pages, and the work couldn’t be more appropriate for the start of the new school year. Cusick’s pieces are comprised of “pages from old schoolbooks that have been altered through a process of scraping and sanding to isolate the illustrations and remove all but a few words of text.” The idea for the exhibition dovetails nicely with the topic of text-guru Michael Corris‘ new book, Art, Word and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, which he published this summer (you can hear Corris talk tonight at the Fort Worth Modern). The release for Cusick’s show is here.