Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds’s Artwork

Cheyenne conceptual artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds makes word paintings, abstract paintings, and public art installations. This chapter considers Heap of Birds’s focus on memory, history, and community as central to his self and community-formulation. Through his artwork using image and text, he contributes to the ongoing project of decolonization: making visible a history of Native erasure and appropriating settler-colonial discourses of place and time, first steps in articulating a contemporary, collective, and sovereign Native identity.

Coda

The Coda reiterates that the post-civil rights era in the United States–with the coalescence of rebellion against historic modes of thought, heightened awareness of the politics of race and gender, and challenges to the artificiality of disciplinary silos –gave rise to a period of intense innovation in autobiographical expression in text and image. During this same period, profoundly new possibilities for image-text self-expression arose as the internet was developed, digital tools were generated, and social media sites were launched. Like the interart autobiographies discussed in Picturing Identity, digital media demands interactive engagement. The conclusion discusses e-poetry as a digital descendant of the forms discussed in the book. Finally, the chapter suggests that scholarly claims that digital technology itself decenters the subject must be reconsidered. It is not technology alone that determines subjectivity. All the writers-artists discussed thematize a split subject that seeks, usually futilely, wholeness.

Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts

African American artist Faith Ringgold’s oversized story quilts are painted and stitched image-text narratives on fabric intended to be hung on art gallery walls. In all her work she thematizes race and gender, part of her project to revise historical misrepresentations and generate more accurate depictions. This chapter discusses Ringgold’s various interventions in a long history of textual and visual domination, noting also Ringgold’s innovations: how quilt squares function simultaneously as individual images or texts and as part of the entire visual field. Each quilt square functions as a page, while a series of quilt squares can function also as a frame. The sets of relations between page and frame and between image and text are multiple and variable.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is an experimental visual autobiography in which she thematizes her parents’ experience of the Japanese Occupation of Korea, their immigration to the United States, as well as her own sense of being in perpetual exile and grappling with the transgenerational trauma that threatens to overwhelm her. This chapter argues that Dictee’s cinematic style arises from Cha’s work in experimental film, correspondence art, and conceptual art. It depicts Cha as a disembodied female voice struggling to visualize embodied speech on the page, all the while offering a self-reflexive commentary on the autobiographical process and her struggle to find a suitable conclusion to her narrative of trauma. Finally, the chapter discusses Dictee’s serial conclusions and Cha’s endlessly deferred return. Rather than narrate a romantic, nostalgic return, Cha visually and textually performs its impossibility in the pages of Dictee

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Photo-Narratives

This chapter explores Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s less discussed works: the photo-texts Storyteller and Sacred Water. The chapter shows how rather than using images to illustrate or explain the text, Silko uses uncaptioned, floating images to create a “field of vision for the reading of the text,” thus emphasizing structurally a Pueblo sense of cyclical time. Pueblo identity, Silko insists, is defined by a long historical connection to place. She reveals how human relationships with land, plants, and animals link past, present, and future into a web of interdependence, highlighting her notion of an ecocentric, rather than homocentric, subjectivity.

Peter Najarian’s Illustrated Memoirs

This chapter discusses Peter Najarian’s illustrated memoirs, autobiographical narratives in book format that incorporate drawings, paintings, and photographs: Daughters of Memory, The Great American Loneliness, and The Artist and His Mother. The son of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Najarian filters the story of his Armenian American family and community through Western art and literature, depicting his legacy of transgenerational trauma. In his assemblage of texts and images, Najarian grapples with the complex issues of representation, memory, history, and subjectivity, forcing readers to look anew.

Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Memoir Maus

Art Spiegelman places transgenerational trauma at the center of his autobiographical comics Maus, revealing how he attempts to understand his parents’ Holocaust experiences and to comprehend the effects of that legacy that has been passed on to him. He depicts the challenges of extracting a coherent story from his father and shaping it into his book, of attempting to comprehend the haunting absence left by his mother’s suicide and the destruction of her journals, and of trying to represent what has been deemed “unrepresentable.” This chapter presents a close reading of Maus, emphasizing Spiegelman’s cinematic style, use of telling detail, mastery of moving between past and present, use of text as image, strategic choices about when to reproduce photographs and when to draw them, and his multiple conclusions that emphasize the impossibility of closure.

Introduction

Arising from a period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, late 20th-century writers and artists challenge inherited notions of subjectivity and experiment with new hybrid forms of autobiographies composed of both image and text. The introduction provides an overview of how disciplinary boundaries have become more porous, leading to a variety of transdisciplinary visual-verbal self-narrations. The chapter reviews key concerns from Autobiography Studies and Visual Studies and how they redefine image-text relations as a matrix or a network with many surfaces and axes of interaction. The introduction also explains the organization of the book: the work of eight writers-artists–Peter Najarian, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Julie Chen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Edgar Heap of Birds, moving from the most literature-based to the most art-based. In dialogue with historical trauma and its consequences, each author asks crucial questions about American identity.

Carrie Mae Weems’s Photo-(Auto)biographies

African American photographer and folklorist Carrie Mae Weems examines in image and text the nature of memory and history, insisting on a critique of historical wrongs as part of a process of self-formulation. As a storyteller-artist, she envisions the artist as the “narrator of history.” This chapter explores the development of her photo-autobiographies from photo-text sequences hung on gallery walls to elaborate architectural installation pieces that require viewers to enter and navigate the narrative visual-verbal space with its many surfaces and interfaces. In the process of showing and telling through photographs and texts and reframing photographic archives, she represents the historical legacy of racial violence to provoke readers-viewers to become aware of injustice and the false narratives that enable it.

Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books

Artists’ books are visual and sculptural objects that reference the structure of the book –the binding, the page, the spine, the text, and the layout. Often, image and text in artists’ books function co-equally. Artists’ books, then, refer to concepts of the book as a material form and a time-based medium. This chapter presents a brief history of artists’ books, then argues that Julie Chen’s artists’ books address time as it relates to subjectivity. She does this by rendering time spatially, slowing down time and forcing readers to focus attentively on a single moment and thus stretching a singular act of attention into a temporal meditation. Ultimately, Chen creates books that mirror structures of cognition, offering readers/viewers an experience of her interiority as an assemblage of interpenetrating moments and processes of consciousness.