Alice Attie


Alice Attie is a visual artist and published poet from New York City. After graduating from Barnard College in New York City with a degree in French literature, Attie obtained an MFA in poetry, studying under June Jordan at the City College of New York. Attie went on to complete a PhD from the Graduate School of the City University of New York in comparative literature, with a doctoral dissertation focused on "modern elegy, specifically on the meeting place of language and the unspeakable: how we accommodate what is inaccessible to language".

Photography and visual art

Attie never formally studied art. Her drawing practice began as an exploration of literary texts, as the expanded inscriptions which they inspired. Class Notes, ongoing, is a series of drawings composed during graduate philosophy and physics seminars at Columbia University. Attie's class notes are taken in the form of drawings.
"Over the past few years, sitting in lectures and seminars at Columbia University, studying philosophy and physics, Alice Attie took 'notes'. Her Class Notes series of drawings are the result, drawings made in the real time of the seminar, in the moment of encounter with ideas and discussion. The drawings are full of movement. In some, she ‘draws’ text in shapes that crisscross and angle across the pages. In others, the fine lines of cursive ink glide freely and swiftly across the page, suggesting language. Sometimes a drawing deploys specific words and phrases, sometimes it gestures at text that we cannot quite read or decipher. These lines are often elongated, extended, dragged and dripping in various directions. What is so striking is the way in the present tense of the lecture – in the very moment of Attie's intellectual engagement – the lecture content is immediately transformed, or translated, into drawing, but drawing that suggests acts of inscription and gesture at verbal expression".
"Attie's ink drawings involve the miniscule, and explore the territory between writing and drawing and where the two overlap. Engaging repetition, rhythm and gradual change, she allows tiny words, figures, numbers and images to accrue and grow on the paper. Whether presenting a landscape of numbers or a language that is not real, she is inspired to trespass over a threshold where language becomes something visual."
Attie's drawing series Take Care of Yourself, inspired by the late lectures of Michel Foucault at the College de France, are writing-drawing abstractions formed by repetitions of the phrase "Take Care of Yourself", referencing the Socratic notion of care as it was addressed in Foucault's studies. The drawings "mediate between a disequilibrium and a quietness. As linguistic gestures, they assure a kind of transgression that disrupts and offers up a contemplative space.
Inspired by nature, Attie's recent photographs feature the meadows, parks, and fields of Iceland, New Hampshire, upstate New York, and Central Park. Taken with her father's old 1937 Rolleiflex camera, her photographs explore the idea of nature as visual poetry.
Her photographic work and drawings on paper can be found in collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Jewish Museum, The Getty Museum in Los Angeles and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, among others.
In 2001, Attie published Alice Attie: Harlem on the Verge,, a photography book of photo portraits and storefronts documenting modern-day Harlem on the verge of gentrification. In 2012, Alice collaborated with photographs in books by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Harlem and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization.
In 2012, Attie collaborated with philosopher Giorgio Agamben contributing photographs to his book The Church and the Kingdom.
Photographs of the artist June Leaf, taken over eighteen years, accompany images of June's drawings in the book Attie completed with Steidl Press to accompany the 2016 Whitney Museum Exhibition: June Leaf: Thought is Infinite.

Poetry

Attie originally entered the art world as a writer, studying literature and poetry throughout her career and obtaining bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in the field. After spending several decades as a distinguished photographer, Attie returned to poetry. Her first volume of poetry, These Figures Lining the Hills, was published by Seagull Books in November 2015. These Figures Lining the Hills was inspired by a simple request from Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books: a call to "write about notes, notes that we write to ourselves, in journals, in notebooks, perhaps notes that we imagine writing, fragments of notes, notes in margins, and notes, perhaps, that are not written". Having kept a journal for almost 50 years, Attie rose to the occasion by culling from her recent notebooks. Attie's poetry book Under the Aleppo Sun, 2018, with Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, is a collection of poems were inspired by her visit to Aleppo, Syria, the home of her grandparents, in March 2011, as the war in Syria was taking hold.

Influences

Attie studied under June Jordan while obtaining her MFA in poetry. She cites George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, and recently, Alice Oswald, as some of many poets who inspire her. She cites the works of the work of Franz Kafka as formative to her work in literature and art. Like Kafka, she sees her work as a mediation between two worlds, one which could be articulated and another which hovered, above or outside, but never in the field of definition. Among her cherished books are: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and she keeps the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens on her nightstand or in her suitcase.

Upcoming works

Attie is currently working on several drawing projects. A series entitled "Notebook Entries" is a group of drawings/writings, accompanied by found photographs and composed on notebook papers culled from her father's old medical school notebooks. These are small stories written to accompany the images. A similar project utilizes newspapers images of refugees and migrants. That project, Crossing and Crossing Again, and another, entitled: Where Are You? are visual elegies inspired by the ongoing crisis.
Two additional books are upcoming. The first will be a collection of small prose pieces inspired by the paintings in the Flemish wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The second will be a collection of responses to existing work: Roland Barthes' lectures The Neutral, The Hermeneutics of the Subject by Michel Foucault, and essays by Jorge Luis Borges.