April 17, 2023 Issue

Andrea K. Scott, in her “At the Galleries,” in this week’s issue, tells about an exhibition at The Drawing Center titled “Of Mythic Worlds.” She says that the show features fifty-three works, “mostly on paper, dating from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.” What caught my eye is her mention that Janet Malcolm is among the show’s featured artists. Scott says, “Readers of this magazine may be especially enticed by Janet Malcolm’s gnomic collages.” Well, yes, I am enticed. A few years ago Granta magazine published a collection of Malcolm’s collages called “The Emily Dickinson Series” (Granta, Issue 126, Winter 2014). The works are strange combinations of photos and documents. Scott’s “gnomic” perfectly describes them. Reading Scott’s review, I wondered what the Malcolm collages at The Drawing Center looked like. I visited drawingcenter.org to see what I could see. Several works in “Of Mythic Worlds” are shown, but none by Janet Malcolm. However, the contents of the exhibition catalogue, Drawing Papers 151: Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past to the Present, are viewable at issuu.com. If you flip through the pages to “Notes on the Artists,” you’ll find an entry on Malcolm. It identifies the collages selected for the show, namely, Ermine and Cleopatra, both from her Emily Dickinson Series (2013). Both works are shown in the “Plates” section of the publication. 

Someday maybe I’ll write a piece tracing Malcolm’s collage-making impulse in her writings. The obvious starting point is her collage-like “Forty-one False Starts” (The New Yorker, July 11, 1994).  

Janet Malcolm, Ermine (2013)