Collection: The Writing on the Wall, Selected By Daniel Nevers (online exhibition)

About the exhibition

As viewers, when we see text in contemporary art, we can breathe a sigh of relief; text feels like an anchor in a sea of not-knowing. Yet the longer we look, the more we come to realize that words are the ultimate abstraction. They stand in for both image and idea, asking us to conjure up pictures in our own imagination.

The artworks in this exhibition treat text in a variety of ways, from ordered lists to commanding slogans. Some are dense with repetition while others are bare with just a single word or phrase. All of them are grounded in the fundamentals of good image-making: line, color, composition.

About the selector

Daniel Nevers is executive director at the Berkeley Art Center. He has taught studio art and professional practices for artists at the University of California, Berkeley; California College of the Arts; and Mills College, and his work has been exhibited locally at Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, Root Division and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Nevers holds an MFA from Mills College and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.