Exhibition: Erica Baum George Eastman Museum 2025 - 2026

the bite in the ribbon—a paper show draws its title from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a text that has long been a touchstone for artist Erica Baum. Tender Buttons is structured as a poetic inventory of a shared domestic life, organized into sections titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” Stein applies an experimental mode of description to her chosen objects or spaces, looking so closely that her poems seem to fracture in the process. Like Stein, Baum brings extraordinary attention to looking and reading, inventing new ways of approaching her found materials and discovering new meanings inherent in them.

From the beginning, Baum has been inspired by language and the visual fields in which language appears. In early series, Baum photographed traces of text on university blackboards, carved into classroom desktops, or methodically ordered into the card catalogs of a reference library. In these pictures, writing shows the signs of its accumulation, revision, and even erasure over time, all of which contribute to the texture of the resulting image.

the bite in the ribbon—a paper show begins with two ongoing series that follow Baum’s early engagement with found language. In Dog Ear and Blanks, Baum turns from hand-written, inscribed, and typed messages to the mass print culture of the published book. Within this conventional form, Baum intervenes by folding the page over into a “dog ear,” a manner of marking one’s place in a text. This common gesture generates a seldom-noticed meeting of the text on the back of the folded page and the page beyond it. Baum formalizes this fold to create a perfect square and documents it photographically.

The example of the work Clock Wise, from the series Dog Ear, illustrates how the folded texts align in unexpected poetic adjacencies. One can read across the fold, “house creaks clockwise with a silk broadcast...” or down the page, “house creaks with a silk coming dawn...” Each reader’s unique approach to the work leads to different interpretations, each the result of a chain of decisions and accidents made by author, publisher, artist, and viewer. In her related series Blanks, Baum employs the same process with textless corners, directing the viewer’s attention to the colors, textures, and form of the paper itself.

Baum’s most recent series, Patterns and Fabrications, continue the artist’s interest in print culture. Patterns looks specifically at mid-twentieth century clothing patterns, in which Baum finds expanses filled with abstract designs and evocative language.

In the work Half Slip, Baum overlaps the gossamer-thin paper, creating layers of receding lines and shapes. The bold, capitalized text is seen out of its context. Perhaps originally an identification or an instruction, the text now suggests a slippage of meaning that results from the passage of time and the artist’s linguistic play. In other works in this series, Baum uses the abrupt machine folds of her found material and the isolation of images through cropping to create complex compositions in which words and images diverge from their former significance.

Fabrications expands on Patterns, opening out into the vibrant world of mid-century craft magazines, how-to books, advertisements, and related materials. Many of the works in this series are composed of layers of paper, joined at their found or folded edges. In the work Page Final Polishing Coma (see back cover), these edges meet, fragmenting and merging elements of the source. Across the five layers, words and even letters are split and combined, while color and shape are likewise transformed. The messages of the original are reconstructed into an abstracted visual environment of unstable meanings.

In works throughout the exhibition, words slip between multiple senses and occasionally dissolve into individual letters or fragments of type. The title of the exhibition itself brings together language from two different poems from Stein’s Tender Buttons, each excerpted from the middle of a sentence. Baum’s choices evoke her found objects—“the bite in the ribbon” suggests the craft materials explored in Patterns and Fabrications, as well as the ribbon of a typewriter. Stein’s phrase “a paper show” becomes a deadpan descriptor of the exhibition as a whole, one that shows the viewer many photographs of paper. In a similar manner, the titles of individual works dart between different modes, at times alluding to the text’s source, describing what is visible, or elaborating on the image in a new direction.

In composing Tender Buttons as studies of objects and environments, Gertrude Stein was confronting the “difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening.” Stein’s experimental writing sought a manner of description that integrated vision with language and communication. In a similar spirit, Erica Baum’s reconstructions of printed materials ask the viewer to simultaneously look closely and read closely. Her work inspires us to practice a different kind of attention, through which new resonances and possibilities can be discovered in the world around us.

—Daniel Peacock, Department of Photography, George Eastman Museum

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Erica Baum (b. 1961, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. Baum received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT (1994) and her BA from Barnard College, New York, NY (1984). Recent solo exhibitions include Off The Cuff, Bureau, New York, NY (2024); Off the Hook, Klemm’s, Berlin, Germany (2024); the bite in the ribbon, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, France (2022); A Method of a Cloak, Square is the Chatter, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2020); A Method of a Cloak, Klemm’s, Berlin, Germany (2020). Group exhibitions include Made in Düssel­dorf: Photographs From the Stadtsparkasse Stiftung, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany (2025); New Directions: Recent Acquisitions, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2024); True Pictures?, Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, Germany (2021); Pictures, Revisited, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2020); Making Knowing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); Anna Atkins Refracted, The New York Public Library, New York, NY (2018); Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); Reconstructions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2015); and The Imminence of Poetics - the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2012). Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; CNAP, Paris, France; FRAC Île de France, Paris, France; among others.