Text Me: How We Live in Language

As a troubled teenager in 1970s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat used graffiti as an outlet for self-expression, tagging buildings in SoHo and the Lower East Side with friend Al Diaz. Unsurprisingly, text appears frequently in the artwork that rocketed Basquiat to fame in the 1980s. In this, one of Basquiat’s more demure works, text is an architectural element, bridging a Cy Twombly–like background and a signature, “naïve” scribble. Yet Basquiat’s choice of word injects a chill into the composition, as it evokes the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. In just a few letters, the artist highlights the systemic racism that negatively impacted his youth, and questions whether it is denying him a rightful place in the pantheon of art.

One of a handful of legendary designers who is actively creating new work, Seymour Chwast—a cofounder of Push Pin Studios—had a pivotal influence in design’s transformation of popular culture in the 1960s and ’70s. Known for his conceptual illustrations and graphic design, Chwast has consistently demonstrated the vital force of design’s role in highlighting injustice. He’s made antiwar posters since the 1950s and continues to work in the genre. He recently completed the book Seymour Chwast at War With War: An Illustrated Timeline of 5000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks, which examines violence throughout human history.

The iconic “End Bad Breath” poster, a response to the United States’ bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam War, provides a lesson in social justice messaging and, along with that, the use of type. The unadorned typeface emphasizes the incontrovertible nature of the action viewers should take. The type also works as a counterpoint to the surreal image and acknowledges the seriousness of the real-world horrors it depicts.

Without text, Lawrence Weiner’s body of work would be almost completely blank. Language is the pith of his art, in the form of large-scale statements ranging from “POISED BETWEEN DISSOLUTION & RESOLUTION / AT THE PRESENT TIME” to “UP UP & AWAY.” One word-art construction makes an appearance in this promotional poster announcing a 1989 show. The forefather of text-as-art, Weiner has tagged his pieces on gallery walls and urban environments extending from Mexico City to Beijing. Weiner’s texts are dynamic, making use of bold colors, unconventional orientations, and minor visual flourishes. His words appear to wave, bounce, and tumble across the facades on which they’re printed. Weiner’s artwork represents a kind of conceptual proto-graffiti, inspiring successive generations of artists who play with language and writing.

In comics, the relationship between text and image is heightened, since the lettering conveys the story as much as the visuals. That storytelling dynamic is one deeply understood by Neil Gaiman, author of milestone graphic novels and genre-defining screenplays. This sequence of panels from Gaiman’s Sandman series, drawn by Marc Hempel and lettered by Todd Klein, depicts the climax of the story, as Morpheus is taken by his sister, Death. Their conversation presents a tangle of epistemological questions: What do we know? How do we know what we know? And how do we comprehend the world? By showing us a layer that exists behind the veil of the tangible, Gaiman’s work helps us make sense of the cosmos—while dismantling the sense that no longer sees truth. Sandman is a fantastical glimpse into our collective imagination, bringing life to mythological constructs embedded deep within our psyches. The panels are a testament to Gaiman’s lyrical approach to telling that story.

Language features prominently in the work of Lesley Dill, an installation and performance artist. Dill has created opera and theater pieces where letters and phrases are emblazoned on characters’ outfits, projected on a scrim at the back of the stage, or extended from their bodies. Such theatrics lead us to examine the relationship these individuals, and we ourselves, have with language. In the performance piece I Dismantle, a solitary woman enters the setting; eventually, several other women approach her and, after tenderly removing silk ties, begin to unfurl rolls of cloth stenciled with sections of the phrase “A single screw of flesh is all that pins the soul.”

Perhaps best known for her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical, Alison Bechdel is one of the most important graphic novelists of our time. Alongside peers like Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, and Roz Chast, Bechdel has elevated comics to an art form by capturing the heartbreak, joy, and optimism in everyday life.

This excerpt from Fun Home illustrates how Bechdel transforms a seemingly mundane moment into a window on personal identity. A folded leg or arched eyebrow conveys father and daughter’s very different comfort levels with gender and sexual fluidity. Although Bechdel captures humanity in a pose, she uses vibrating hand-rendered letters to reinforce the tension the characters feel about masculinity and femininity.

Ed Fella has made and continues to make an indelible mark on the field of graphic design. His deconstructions of type, imagery, and design—paired with his avant-garde perspective—defined a language of design that even the edgiest of contemporary designer-typographers hasn’t caught up with. Because he began working with type when it was still a physical entity, Fella understands the evolutionary history of typography, analog and digital, and uses that knowledge to splice its DNA. Fella is a William S. Burroughs of the printed page, creating cut-ups and collages, commenting on culture by disassembling and reassembling the vernacular we find around us. Ever the rascal, Fella made these posters after the events they announce were over.

This 2007 poster is a showcase of Marian Bantjes’ brilliance. Bantjes makes the two-dimensional space of the page into a three-dimensional typescape, a canvas that alludes to fashion, architecture, carpentry, and drawing. The ornamentation on display here is a consistent thread throughout Bantjes’ work. Her revelatory, lush monographs—I Wonder and Pretty Pictures—explore her work, process, and thoughts on both. What’s particularly striking about Bantjes is that so many of her designs break new ground but she never repeats herself; and everything fits into her remarkable vision. In this TypeCon promotion, she treats type as though she were a woodworker, shaping and sanding letters as though she went into an imaginary landscape of the page and hand carved them there. She continued the three-dimensional motif in other materials she designed for the event, themed “Letterspace.”

Artist Miranda July is a polymath whose unique use of language and imagery consistently hits a cultural nerve. Indeed, only 10 years after her first filmmaking project, July accepted a Caméra d'Or prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for Me and You and Everyone We Know. In this roller shade she created for The Thing Quarterly, July is making subtle reference to her breakout feature, in which characters post explicit, revealing messages to one another on their windows. Here she rejects window shades as a means of discretion: Drawing them does not grant you privacy at all. Rather, the action invites passersby to casually project their own narratives and judgments onto you.

From her prolific work in The New Yorker to the award-winning autobiography Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, cartoonist Roz Chast endears herself to readers again and again in the unlikeliest way—by revealing her most shameful feelings. Thanks to a self-flagellating sense of humor, as well as an aesthetic that simultaneously smiles and grimaces, Chast admits selfishness, guilt, and all manner of fretfulness. She reveals such intimacies in a way that spurs our compassion instead of our outrage; we relate to her struggles and admire her for her honesty. Her trademark lettering and characters contribute to the force of her absurdities. In The Mysteries of Business Class, Chast takes on the subject of class anxiety with characteristic charm, and wins our sympathy in the very first frame. Exemplified here, the cartoonist’s wider body of work reveals the full emotional scope of the comics genre. From pathos to heartbreak to hubris to hilarity: everything is captured.

Sam Winston is a kabbalist. He literally delves into text to ferret out the hidden messages of words and language. Winston uses language as his paint, demonstrating how narratives can coalesce into something new. His book A Dictionary Story tells a charming chronicle of the lexicon’s inhabitants through the visual stylings of concrete poetry. To create these abstract works shown here, Winston took the text from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and separated it into three categories: rage, passion, and solace. He then assembled the verses from those categories, typeset them, printed them, and collaged them, by hand, into these extraordinary forms. Winston is obsessive and painstaking. These constructions capture emotions and moods as much as they are living forms of art. Romeo and Juliet itself is already full of complexity; Winston’s collages suggest there are more layers to be discovered.

These typeset and collage prints are from the passion category...

...and these are from the rage category.

The renowned American artist Ed Ruscha is Pop Art’s answer to Edward Hopper. Ruscha has depicted gas stations, commercial buildings, and other emblems of vernacular American life almost continually since he moved to Los Angeles in 1956. He often superimposes text on such scenes, as well, and in 1980 he created a font called Boy Scout Utility Modern precisely for these words and phrases. The Study of Friction and Wear on Mating Surfaces represents how Ruscha uses text to clarify the meaning of a seemingly ambiguous landscape image—and the subtext of his chosen medium. Whereas Hopper’s scenes hint at the frayed spirituality of their occupants, Ruscha expresses cynicism, hope, and desire explicitly.

Maison Martin Margiela’s clothing and accessories put an avant-garde twist on fashion. For this project, the label took its “reinventionary” lens to a calendar. This version is made from cotton-canvas fabric with embroidered dates and numbers. With that transformation, normally intangible type becomes a tactile surface with texture and dimensionality. Forget about throwaway fashion: Once the month has passed, the cloth page can be detached and used as a napkin or placemat.

Starlee Kine is a radio producer and writer who was a longtime contributor to This American Life. Her 2015 podcast The Mystery Show, which aired at about the same time as Serial, is credited for helping to expand podcasting beyond the personal recollections that had dominated the genre. The cutting board that Kine conceived for The Thing Quarterly is partly self-reflexive: When we listen to podcasts, we’re likely chopping vegetables or unloading the dishwasher simultaneously. But knowledge of Kine’s resume isn’t required to understand this object’s message. The cutting board represents the rare quiet that chores can provide, as well as the private stories we tell our household tools, and ourselves, in these uninterrupted moments.

This piece by Dave Eggers, created for The Thing Quarterly, brings an intimate twist to the question of our relationship to objects. Can any human be a hero or heroine to their shower curtain? As writer and publisher, Eggers is no stranger to the multiple mediums where text takes root, but the shower curtain offers a new screen. With typical wit, Eggers infuses its monologue with eroticism and playful voyeurism. But Eggers’ shower curtain is not merely an ironic Peeping Tom who disdains nakedness and the uncleanness of human flesh. It is a poetic witness to the magic of how bodies grow and evolve. Ultimately it envelops the body to create a safe space where flesh is nothing short of a miracle.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies’ work addresses race, equality, and social justice. He left his native Rhodesia because of racial discrimination in the white minority-ruled country, later returning to the newly majority-ruled Zimbabwe to focus on work highlighting social justice issues. The designer has created work relating to African self-determination, international human rights, and the plight of child soldiers. He has consistently advocated for design’s role in addressing injustice, and is one of the design community’s most powerful voices pointing out racism—in the world and the discipline of design.

Maviyane-Davies explores how design and text can be used as a tool of the powerful or a rallying cry for the disenfranchised. The poster shown, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Birmingham’s agreement to desegregate, forces viewers to question what progress has been made.

In this poster, the designer Paul Sahre renders his life motto.

San Francisco-based Jennifer Sterling is a designer, typographer, illustrator, and educator. Hers is one of the most visually distinct voices in contemporary graphic design. She is known for her minimalist style and uncanny ability to transform type into modern art on the page as seen in this poster for the Think Creatively Design Conference.

This piece depicts one of the most common constructs in the art world: the still life. A plate of fish, a bunch of fresh oranges, and a flower ensconced in a vase—an image we’ve seen countless times in countless galleries. But then, scrawled on top of the painting, is a challenge, a dare. Jeffers has used the same text in paintings of landscapes and nudes, two other conventional forms that we have “seen” before. We look closer in order to defy the message. We look for a clue—what does this artist not want us to see? The work incites us to a new level of engagement. We emerge from the encounter with eyes wide open.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that position and momentum cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrary precision. It’s a foundational principle in the field of quantum mechanics. An iteration of this proof appears here, superimposed over a smear of pink that obfuscates our view of Christ’s face, itself hovering over a marred and stained piece of liturgical ephemera. It’s a symbol of uncertainty juxtaposed against a symbol of certainty, of assured faith. Perhaps it depicts uncertainty triumphing over certainty, or perhaps Jeffers is simply telling us that the two can coincide in the same space comfortably.

Brian Rea illustrates the “Modern Love” column in The New York Times, and he drew the illustrations for the Malcom Gladwell Collected box set. Rea’s illustrations for the Gladwell collection, designed by Paul Sahre, made the set into a stunning artwork.

Rea has a remarkable facility in capturing existential moods through illustrations and artworks that blend reality with psychic states. The seemingly ordinary surfaces and objects in his drawings function as the metaphors for our inner lives. They capture ideas with imaginatively visual adroitness. Rea’s “Modern Love” illustrations convey emotional sentiments without using any type.

In contrast, some of his drawings use a profusion of words to form objects, emotions, and individual stories.

These drawn pieces, some of them like handwritten journal pages, explore grand and more down-to-earth mythologies that define us.

The Tel Aviv–based Oded Ezer is one of the few experimental typographers in the world. In addition to running his own eponymously named type design studio, his type foundry Hebrew Typography provides his sharply crafted modern fonts to clients who use them in magazines, websites, packaging, billboards, television infographics, and more. While those typefaces satisfy mainstream tastes, his conceptual design projects explore more countercultural territory. He’s created typographic installations like Art vs. Design, in which he manipulated elements of classic paintings and sculptures to create letters. The tool GifWriter allows viewers to be creators of their own.

In his books 1 Page at a Time and Pick Me Up, Adam J. Kurtz appeals to the world-weary optimist in each of us who must deal with the mundane challenges of modern life while aspiring to do something greater. His humorous self-help illustrations and checklists allow readers to express their hopes, dreams, and frustrations. Handwriting—both his own and his readers—is essential to this process of authentic expression, and Kurtz gains our trust by giving such truthful form to our emotional life, as he does in this installation.

Vit and Gomez-Palacio have been preoccupied by words, online and off, since the get-go. In 2002, they launched the design blog Speak Up, a forum for design commentary that examined type, branding, and language with groundbreaking panache. The site gathered a vibrant community and was included in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 2006 National Design Triennial. The offshoot Word It invited designers to visually interpret a word or phrase.

Vit and Gomez-Palacio pride themselves on their hands-on approach in all endeavors of their firm Under Consideration, which has gone on to organize conferences. For the programs for their Brand New Conference, they individually placed seven rhinestones on the covers’ elaborately patterned letters, adding a lighthearted and handcrafted punctuation to what would be a serious discourse on branding.

Guns are a loaded political issue, so to speak. Our individual viewpoints on gun ownership and other hot-button topics provide a litmus test of our identities. Often, we are so adamant about our perspective that we are unwilling to listen to the other side’s.

Singer’s intent in creating these pieces—part of a larger series featuring phrases like “nature is bad for the economy” and “debt is good for the economy—is to examine the criteria we use to evaluate what’s good and bad.

In celebrated commissions for clients ranging from The Public Theater to MoMA and Citibank, Paula Scher created a design genre entirely her own. As a partner at Pentagram, she shapes visual culture both in the United States and internationally. Many of her classic pieces are built around playful compositions of type; in her personal work, she creates large-scale paintings of geography intricately illustrated with place-names, allowing her to play further with lettering as an art form. This piece shows interstates in the United States, yet evokes some other, perhaps bodily, geography. The absence of location names reminds us of their value. Scher renders visual poetry with a logic and life force that we revere yet don't fully understand.

If he wanted to, Stefan Sagmeister could copyright his own handwriting—it is a work of art itself. The designer’s unmistakable script and cursive, often in combination, has appeared on numerous canvases: the cover of a Lou Reed album, throughout books, inscribed into a watermelon, and on posters for Sagmeister’s events. In one such promotion, he had an assistant use a razor to carve the writing onto his torso. Sagmeister is a conceptual designer and performance artist, an author, innovator, and filmmaker. Throughout most everything he does, he is a provocateur. His writing appears again and again, as it does here, handwritten on these limited-edition boxes for his Happy Film—part of a long-term project exploring happiness. His script is part of a related exhibition. Wherever it appears, Sagmeister’s handwriting makes us feel like we’re looking at a page of his diary made expressly for us.

Abbott Miller employs conceptual art to comment on the political moment and on design itself. This diptych combines two milestones of art and design: the iconic hand Saul Bass designed for the film The Man with the Golden Arm (1956), transformed into a building; and the text of a 1916 poem by Guillaume Apollinaire called “It’s Raining,” a renowned piece that creates an image of rain with its showering text. Lines from the poem include “it’s raining women’s voices as if they were dead even in memory,” and “listen to the fetters falling that bind you high and low.”

'it’s raining women’s voices as if they were dead even in memory
it’s raining you too marvelous encounters of my life oh droplets
and those clouds rear and begin to whinny a universe of auricular cities
listen to it rain while regret and disdain weep an ancient music
listen to the fetters falling that bind you high and low'

Abbott Miller, a Pentagram partner since 1999, is one of the most conceptual designers working today. Text is fundamental to Miller’s work. He has designed and authored magazines, books, and projects in other media. Writing and critiquing design has been integral to his creativity ever since he cofounded the firm Design/Writing/Research, his first endeavor in the field. His work pushes the boundaries between conceptual art and graphic design in a way that no one else does. In this piece, he quotes cultural iconography to comment on our political situation, creating a wreath-like celebration that references Donald Trump’s admiration of Vladimir Putin: “VP.” Miller has a professorial, laid-back manner, making the outspokenness of his statement particularly striking.

Adrienne Grace’s king-size pillow features phrases spoken or written by President Donald J. Trump; the sham provides him with a place to lay his head on. With these pieces, Grace shows us how we live in language, and in the perspective we create through our words, truthful or not. Grace is an art director/designer at the strategic branding firm Vim and Vigor. Her pillow is an information graphic given three-dimensional form, asking us, “Can we rest with these truths pressing against us?”

The embroidered sham more specifically echoes folk art and quilts, suggesting the populist movement that elected Trump as well as the bombast that surrounds him.

The artist Brian Singer creates minimalist meditations on words and phrases that examine cultural conflict. He compresses a great deal of thought into seemingly simple pieces.

In his piece Defund/Defend, the multiple meanings of both words generate tension. What are we defunding? Are we defunding so that we can defend? Are the two always in binary opposition or are they complementary?

Since emerging under the pseudonym Candyass in the early 1990s, Cary Leibowitz has made a career of confessing his low opinion of himself. Leibowitz’s iterations on self-abasement have graced everything from traditional canvases to belt buckles and these coffee mugs, whose straightforward typeface suggest the ease with the artist can admit feelings of failure. While Leibowitz dismisses his work as the internal dialogue of a gay, Jewish man given physical form, we can see it as a dressing down of the art world—Leibowitz’s pieces question the legitimacy of a club that accepts him as a member. More important, they express the ennui and insecurity that every person harbors, however secretly.

San Francisco-based Christopher Simmons is a designer committed to political discourse. In addition to heading up the design firm MINE, his book Just Design focuses on the importance of design for social good. The pieces he’s created specifically for Text Me work within that genre while being exemplars of pop art. He uses the vernacular typography of game shows and vintage electronic games to investigate the attitudes that define today’s culture.

San Francisco-based Christopher Simmons is a designer committed to political discourse. In addition to heading up the design firm MINE, his book Just Design focuses on the importance of design for social good. The pieces he’s created specifically for Text Me work within that genre while being exemplars of pop art. He uses the vernacular typography of game shows and vintage electronic games to investigate the attitudes that define today’s culture.

San Francisco-based Christopher Simmons is a designer committed to political discourse. In addition to heading up the design firm MINE, his book Just Design focuses on the importance of design for social good. The pieces he’s created specifically for Text Me work within that genre while being exemplars of pop art. He uses the vernacular typography of game shows and vintage electronic games to investigate the attitudes that define today’s culture.

San Francisco-based Christopher Simmons is a designer committed to political discourse. In addition to heading up the design firm MINE, his book Just Design focuses on the importance of design for social good.

Taking a page from what might be Jenny Holzer’s aphorisms dictionary, designer/artist Christopher Simmons puts his money where his mouth is for a conceptual art statement that could easily become a pop culture phenomenon. The piece leads us to question the way we create value, since the cost of the artwork would undoubtedly be more than the dollar amount and gold (leaf) framed here. The appeal of the slogan suggests it would be a winner if mass produced.

As head of the graduate program in graphic design at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Elliot Earls fosters innovation through mentoring students and in his own practice—which includes performance art and a YouTube series. Cranbrook has long been an experimental hub, and like the school where he teaches, Earls straddles the line between design and art as few other designers do. He often includes, extrudes, and distorts type in his pieces, which sometimes look like 2D and 3D excerpts from an avant-garde comic. The Cyclops figure shown here is a recurring motif for Earls. It appears in one of his YouTube videos when he observes, “Art and design objects are a component of the human struggle against solipsism. In that they are objectified thought, they are an intermediary between subjects.”

Any child of the ’80s will recognize the imagery featured here in Lisa Congdon’s colorful collection of pop memorabilia. Every generation tends to look back on childhood with rose-colored glasses, but this Technicolor depiction is reasonably authentic. Childhood staple brands like My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, Atari, and Kool-Aid all leveraged the rainbow, a symbol of bright hope for the future after a dark storm. Congdon reappropriates the imagery as a celebration of queer identity.

Margie Butler is a painter based in Providence, Rhode Island. By day, she works in brand strategy, but apart from that one would be likely to find her painting in her home studio. Her collages are usually intimately small, and often composed of found materials. This mixed media collage is rich with color, pattern, and texture. A snippet of text peeks out from the left center, from medicinal packaging. The rest is a series of overlapping abstractions, apart from one message: “We are living sensitive times.” It’s difficult to argue with such a sentiment.

Milton Glaser knows a few things about type. During his decades as a leading light in graphic design—as a cofounder of Push Pin Studios and New York magazine, as partner at the publication design consultancy WBMG, and later as head of his own studio—Glaser has created seminal work that changed culture and inspired a legion of graphic designers. He employs type with a heightened understanding of its power and purpose. Yes, he created the Bob Dylan poster, but he also developed layouts for The Washington Post. He did emoticon before the genre was invented. Perhaps more than any other living designer, Glaser’s work shows how design is an integral part of culture, and how the individual designer can become a historic figure; his work marks milestones and movements, eras and trends. Glaser has designed interiors and environmental signage, not to mention objects including plates and watches for his commissioned projects.

This bench takes his typography into four-dimensional time, while playing with the way words project on two-dimensional planes. As the sun shifts, the shadow morphs and moves. When the bench is full, its message will be obscured. The piece suggests a whole new realm of typographic sculpture that reacts and changes with the elements.

Rodrigo Corral has created some of pop culture’s most iconic visuals: for Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jay Z’s Decoded, and Chuck Palahniuk’s books, to name just a few. He has a stunning capacity to evoke a narrative in a singular design. Throughout his career, Corral has been making conceptual art that delves into pop culture obsessions and iconography. He makes objects, posters, and drawings. While his book covers are universally relatable, the meaning of his art projects sometimes remains obscure, requiring viewers willing to investigate their underlying purpose. In this installation, Corral comments on the way that text can create a dynamic of reciprocation and interaction between people, almost like a currency. Ostensibly, the hand-scripted labels tell us what these vases contain, but the actual content within them remains unknown, inscrutable.

From the time in the late 1980s when Shepard Fairey started posting his guerilla art throughout urban environments, he has been the voice of an antiestablishment movement. His “Obey Giant” stickers and posters, now seen in cities all over the world, convey a resistance to authority through a combination of humor and ambiguity. The message is constructed from imagery that is recognizable yet obscure. A pop culture alchemist, Fairey knows precisely how to make images that go viral. His 2007 Obama “Hope” poster encapsulated the aspiration that the candidate represented; more recently, the street artist’s “We The People” posters, showing a Muslim, Hispanic, and African-American woman, were embraced at protests and as personal expressions of resistance. The “Wake Up!” poster seeks to coalesce a movement and inspire viewers to get involved.

Since 2001, the designer Stephen Doyle has been making handmade sculptures out of books. He considers the work a respite from a typical day of problem-solving at his firm Doyle & Partners. Through words, books allow us entry to a four-dimensional landscape of narrative; Doyle’s sculptures take the medium’s architecture and deconstruct it into evocations of story. Doyle has made these artworks from a wide spectrum of classics and contemporary works including Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Discourses.

For this sculpture, Doyle started with Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia. His artwork references the recent attempt to discover the author’s true identity. As Doyle explains, “the sculpture is about words escaping their original context, and an author being unmasked, and, ultimately, the explosive power of language."

The distinctive line art, script, and outline writing of designer Timothy Goodman animates his personal work and commissions from clients. Such talents allow him to capture his inner life in self-reflexive projects like 40 Days of Dating, a romantic experiment and book collaboration he authored with fellow design world wunderkind Jessica Walsh. His recent murals tell the story of relationships, and Goodman reflects on his own role in the doubt and anxiety that mark all relationships, where they stumble too fast from “hello,” to “you’re cute,” to “I love you.” The text was originally created for Instagram, where countless flirtations like this are born. Time here is shrunk down to a slab of text, presenting a narrative that only emerges after the fizzy courtesies of a meet-cute have finished.

In this layered and unsettling piece, Tony Pinto considers his father’s identity. The photo we see initially seems like a celebratory portrait; as we look more closely, we discover the hashtags.

Pinto runs the Orange County, California–based design firm Vim & Vigor with his wife Adrienne Grace. He is known primarily as a designer, though he has been creating artwork for years. The work he makes, as shown here, draws on his design and type expertise. This piece promoted an exhibition of autobiographical artwork exploring Pinto’s relationship with his parents.

David Shrigley’s tragicomic, self-referential black-and-white line drawings communicate a sense of angst about modern life. His books, illustrations, posters, and cartooned scenes are populated by grotesque humans, sardonic animals, and sentient objects whose observations and aphorisms wouldn’t be out of place in our online messages, where human communication is reduced to memes and reaction images. Shrigley’s signature handwriting and linework are integral to his voice and humor, as evident in this leatherbound “travel wallet” containing printed missives Shrigley scripted. These form the bizarro world version of a Lonely Planet guidebook, certain to pull us into the artist’s charmingly misanthropic attempts at connection.

Since the 1980s, Deborah Kass has been putting a frame around pop culture iconography. Her Art History series placed reproduced images from well-known comics and animation into abstract collages. In The Warhol Project, she created self-portraits and celebrity homages in perfect Warholian style but tweaked to an agenda of women’s empowerment and Jewish pride. More recently, she created the subversive “Vote Hillary” painting of Donald Trump. Type and lettering have been recurring elements in her work, as in the 2010 Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times, which featured phrases like “C’mon get happy,” “Forget your troubles,” and the first iterations of the combo of “Oy” and “Yo.” Several years later, she made the word into a large-scale sculpture. The pairing laconically captures the attitude, charm, and cultural narrative of New York City, the way that one place—or body—embodies two different identities. It’s also an amusing riposte to the Robert Indiana Love sculpture.

Words come alive in artist Gemma O’Brien’s work, which combines lettering, illustration, and design into a singular form of storytelling. The artwork she makes—for galleries, magazines, corporate installations—evokes Lawrence Weiner, the graphic novel Watchmen, children’s fables, and postcards from a 1960s science fiction novel. O’Brien’s hand-craft is evident throughout her calligraphy, murals, and artwork; naturally, she teaches hand-lettering workshops. She created You Are Here on site specifically for Text Me.