Current Exhibition

Striking Characters: Typewriters, Literary Worlds, and the Art of Tim Youd

This exhibition takes seemingly disparate works created on a typewriter—a typescript draft of The Wiz, a retyped diptych of An American Marriage, Vietnam-era protest flyers made by Emory students, first editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—and puts them in conversation with one another and with the works of LA-based performance artist Tim Youd.

The show sets the vast riches of Emory Libraries literary archives and the performance and visual art of Mr. Youd in dialogue with one another to highlight the ways that the historical record inspires art, and conversely, how art gives new life to the historical record. Featuring literary archives from the Stuart A. Rose Library and Tim Youd’s distinctive performance and visual art—including “diptychs” produced during live novel typing performances, typewriter ribbon-inspired visual art and sculpture—Striking Characters demonstrates that the typewriter is not only a tool for efficient writing, but a technology that empowered a new age of storytelling, imaginative expression, and political resistance from the 19th century onward.

Curated by Rose Library Instruction Archivist Shanna Early, PhD, and Humanities Librarian for English Hannah C. Griggs.