SEEING WORDS, New Work by Sally Van Doren

In Seeing Words, her upcoming show at The Cornwall Library, artist Sally Van Doren presents a selection of works on paper that explore the conceptual terrain created when words become image. An acclaimed poet, her drawings, paintings, prints and poems arise from the same source, thousands of pages of illegible handwriting, also known as asemic drawing.

Seeing Words offers new drawings from her Anagram Series as well as asemic works. Van Doren works with materials including stencils, graphite, colored pencil, ink, marker, oil pastel and spray paint. She says “I find that between writing legible poetry and making illegible visual art, I vacillate constantly between being in a state of losing language and a state of finding it.”

As a practicing visual artist, Van Doren formalized her training at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts. She exhibits regularly, most recently with a solo show at Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Falls Village. Her work is held in distinguished private and corporate collections and also featured on the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022) and two of her own books.

She is the author of four volumes of poetry published by LSU Press: Sibilance (2023)

Promise (2017), Possessive (2012), and Sex at Noon Taxes (2008), which received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her ongoing poetic memoir, The Sense Series, served as the text for a multimedia installation at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Her poems have been featured by NPR, PBS, and The Poetry Foundation, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. They have also appeared in magazines such as The New Republic, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry London. A graduate of Princeton and University of Missouri-St. Louis (MFA), she has taught at the 92nd Street Y, the St. Louis Public Schools and other institutions, most recently Scoville Memorial Library.

A native St. Louisan, she first came to Cornwall in 1980 with her now husband, John Van Doren. She lives in Cornwall Hollow and New York and works from her studio in West Cornwall.

At the Artist’s Reception, there will be a book signing, and art will be for sale. On the next day, November 12, Van Doren will lead a writing workshop, also at the library, from 1 to 3 pm. Enrollment at the workshop is limited and registration is required. Learn more about the workshop and register for it on our Events page.