UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Adam Daley Wilson, Mark Melnicove, Liz Starr, Laura Dunn

Adam Daley Wilson

My text-based pieces propose—first—that such a thing as Post-Theory Art may be seen in relation to traditional conceptual art and—second—that such a post-theory art and practice can be defined as substantive theory-making by an artist, in any medium, that is not only cognitive, but also emotional-felt, and also sensory-felt. In other words, the communication by an artist of substantive ideas that land in a recipient’s head, heart, and body, all at once.

Most recently, my text-based pieces also propose that one example of possible art practices in Post-Theory Art is “artist-placed public document art”—when an artist creates a substantive theory of rights or justice that is of importance to the general public interest, and then places it into a public court of law—art-as-law—or law-as-art—and our public court system’s resulting response lands not just in the heads, hearts, and lived experiences of the participants, but also in members of the general public, if the public issue sufficiently resonates.

In all of this, Post-Theory Art is proposed as the potential for uniquely human-to-human artistic communication and interpretation. When an artist makes a work with their head, heart, and body—all three—and when a viewer then experiences it themselves through all three—even if the interpretations by viewers are different than the intended communication by the artist—then perhaps this is a special and unique human-to-human connection of head, heart, and body-felt experience—a combination, perhaps, that artificial intelligence may never be able to do. 

If so, Post-Theory Art, by communicating substantive theories about humanity, through the emotional and sensorial, not just the cognitive, may perhaps be a way to preserve our human theory-making, and our human creativity, in this new time, when now something else, for the first time, can make theories too.

My “post-theory art” body of work currently falls into three visual types: (1) large-scale oil-stick “inscribed paintings” and “new cave paintings,” having dozens of layers of abstracted semantic text, in the artist’s loose handwriting, part of the artist’s personal writing system; (2) precisely painted visual-text pieces, with the artist’s text in oil on large canvases of abstract photos of the natural, taken by the artist up and down the coast of Maine; (3) and smaller works—including actual legal filings on matters of general public interest, rights, and justice, such as relating to the improper exploitation of mental illness and stigma by lawyers, and the improper misuse of procedure to harm the local rule of law—that are exemplars of “artist-placed public document art.”

Adam Daley Wilson is a self-taught artist with degrees from Stanford Law and UPenn. His work draws from his self-study of conceptual art history, text-based art in other cultures and times, semiotics, and art theory. He makes his work during his creative mild hypomanias that arise from his mental illness of bipolar I. He practices law (constitutional, public interest), mentors artists internationally pro bono, and serves on Maine non-profit boards that work in the general public interest relating to mental illness, academia, and public spaces.

 

Mark Melnicove — Shaking It Up with WordArt

I’ve been altering words from the texts of other writers (anonymous or not) since 1975, when I started to cut individual words out of magazines and assemble them into lines of poetry. Sometime after, I came across Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS (1977). He created his book by whitening out words from Milton’s PARADISE LOST. (In bold are the letters Johnson kept for his title.)

I, too, experimented with white-outs; they proved to be a direct way to interact with someone else’s texts, literary or demotic. Not that anything was wrong with them; I just wanted to discover what else might be hidden and unexpressed within their lines.

In May 1980, I stopped to buy a second-hand prayer book in a Camden shop (while hitchhiking to the Maine Poets Festival at College of the Atlantic). For months after, I applied white acrylic paint to its well-thumbed pages to produce new poems from old prayers. I liked that I never knew what pruned text would emerge from an already existing one until I started to redact it. With white-outs (and then, in 1981, with black-outs), I spontaneously broke free of my old habits of writing.

In 1982, I added collage techniques to my practice, a symbiotic marriage of words and art, language and images, marks and likenesses. Nothing was predetermined (or untouchable) in this rejiggering of texts and pictures. What formed was sometimes semantic, sometimes asemic, but always synergetic.

The four pieces reproduced here are retunings. In the span of fifty years, the discourse of my WordArt has developed a fruitful dialogue with my poetry and prose. My aim, no matter the medium, topic, or theme, has been to create truths I and others understand, however imperfectly or conditionally. As Aaron Neville would sing, in a voice that shook the whole world, “Tell . . . it . . . like . . . it . . . is . . . ”

 

Liz Starr

I see we are all more hungry to be heard than to feast on others’ words. If I write a word, where will it go? Will it arrive at the destination that I intended it for? I type words into a computer on a “post” that goes out into cyberspace for a thousand eyes to see. I understand that few will read it, or hear my voice. Maybe if I make an image to enhance my words the message will have a better chance to be read. I see all my fellow humans typing and sending their words out into the miasmic abyss—like screaming into a large crater of darkness. Which words are chosen to be read and absorbed by a thousand hungry eyes searching for something edible?

I paint poems sometimes, there in the hush of my lonely studio with only a few mice to witness my efforts. I see the signs that they were there. My poem paintings are labors of love. The creative process for them is imbued with a strong sense of participating in something real and substantial. Then I know I have created something tangible. I can hold it in my hands as I read the poem. I feel the coarseness of the paper, and I can smell the paint. I feel the weight of it as art.

Since childhood I have been scribbling frantically—words and doodles, as if some force had taken possession of my fingers. The message to myself was: “Make a mark! Show them you are alive!” For I drew and made letters more than I spoke out loud. 

I still write my sorrows and draw images of what I see and feel, though it all may be beyond my understanding. Writing and drawing are seeking and looking, yet they might make even more mystery, questions, and more conundrums.

 

Laura Dunn

So I was thinking I’d provide a link to a really cool song that hits all the marks, Tom Tom Club’s “Wordy Rappinghood.” Have a listen. It’s an amazing, super fun dive into the power of words!

So good, I can’t possibly have anything better to say.

But . . . 

I use words in my artwork because, like a shot in the arm, they go directly into the blood stream, causing a visceral reaction. My piece Gender Is a Spectrum is a statement, not a question, not a topic up for debate. It is my belief, and I am sticking with it. On the other side of this piece, I painted the phrase, “we were all born of women,” another statement in response to the ubiquitous political and cultural war on women. These text works bubble straight up from my mind and need to get out on the surface. A sort of catharsis.

Conversely, for Double Totem, which is part of my Dogon Ladder series, I tapped into the concept of asemic writing. This type of writing has a long history in art and is a form of visual poetry. It is a nonsense language of marks that has no semantic meaning, but is called writing as it shares the aesthetics and visual cues of writing. I really love this idea and openness of a nonsense language with no inherent meaning.

Asemic writing is a provocation to thought; and the thinking it encourages is not that of a system or science. It is open-ended, based in wonder and wondering.
—Peter Schwenger, 2019