Call a Wrecking Ball to Make a Window

Shana Agid, American, born 1974

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March 2012

Artist's book; letterpress on Thai mulberry paper with letterpress-printed envelope

13/40

Overall: 10 1/4 × 7 5/8 × 1/16 in. (26 × 19.4 × 0.2 cm)

Sheet: 30 1/16 × 22 1/16 in. (76.3 × 56 cm)

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Contemporary Art Fund

© Shana Agid

2013.66

Publisher

Rind Press, Minneapolis

Geography

Place Made: United States, North America

Period

20th century

Object Name

Written Communication: Book

Research Area

Mixed Media

Not on view

Inscriptions

Signed and dated, on reverse of envelope, lower right, in graphite: sm agid 2012

Label

In this artist’s book, Shana Agid created a queer cartography of place and belonging by tracing the movement and spaces made by queer people in New York City from the 1970s to the 2000s. Of this work, the artist states:

Drawing links between the lives of gay men in that period and my own coming out into the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s, the book proposes a fantastic landscape in which these lives overlap through the geography and infrastructure of the city. By following the writings of David Wojnarowicz, the queer writer and artist who died of AIDS in 1992, I trace his moves in and through Manhattan’s grid, attempting to link back to my own queer trajectories, first as a young lesbian, and now as a trans person.

From the 2024 exhibition [Un]Mapping: Decolonial Cartographies of Place, curated by Beatriz Yanes Martinez, Hood Museum Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow, Curatorial and Exhibitions

Course History

GEOG 11, Qualitative Methods and the Research Process in Geography, Abigail Neely, Winter 2015

ANTH 50.33, Cartographic Encounters, Kenneth Bauer, Spring 2020

GEOG 25, Social Justice and the City, Erin Collins, Fall 2021

COCO 26, What's In Your Toolbox?, Moktar Bouba and Tania Convertini, Fall 2021

GEOG 29, Global Cities, Erin Collins, Winter 2022

Geography 29.01, Global Cities, Erin Collins, Spring 2023

Geography 25.01, Sociology 49.22, Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies 37.03, Social Justice and the City, Erin Collins, Fall 2023

Anthropology 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Charis Boke, Summer 2024

Exhibition History

[Un]Mapping: Decolonial Cartographies of Place, Harteveldt Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 8 -November 3, 2024.

Provenance

Booklyn Artists Alliance, Brooklyn, New York; sold to present collection, 2013.

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