About the Art
The Buckeye Reading Room, on the second floor of The Ohio State University’s Thompson Library, features a two-layer cork floor covered in words. The installation, VERSE, was designed by Ohio artist Ann Hamilton in 2011. 299 lines of quotations taken from two texts that purport to narrate the unfolding of human history — E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World and Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone — are arranged according to their intersection with the concordance of a third text, “The End of the World,” as transcribed in Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz’s compendium, American Indian Myths and Legends.
VERSE uses individual words from “The End of the World” (told by the Indigenous White River Sioux of the American Upper Midwest) as an index to sort phrases from the other two texts. Two hundred ninety-nine words from the Sioux tale are arranged alphabetically along the reading room’s central axis, from “A” at the far north end to “Years” at the south. The text on either side of the axis is from alternating passages of Mirrors and Little Histories that include the index word from “The End of the World.” Thus, what initially appears as a chaotic jumble of unrelated phrases is a highly systematic orchestration of the three texts, intended to reveal their parallels through the moments where a significant word like “Fire” or “Mountains” is shared.
Only a few words from the Sioux story that have no match in the other two texts — “Porcupine Quills,” “Robe,” “Textile” and “Unravels” — are left to transmit the unique richness of their source. Hamilton’s interweaving of the three texts is both an attempt at recuperation and a warning. She centers the Sioux oral tradition in her sprawling installation while imploring the viewer to consider the subtle violence implicit in de-contextualizing Indigenous knowledge in the name of academic research as represented by the scholarly tool of the literary concordance, as the individual words are preserved by their meaning is lost.
Collection of The Ohio State University. Funded through the Ohio Percent for Art program.
Material
Cork
Location
Inside of Thompson Library
About the Artist
Born in Lima, Ohio, Ann Hamilton earned her bachelor’s degree in textiles from the University of Kansas in 1979 and then her master’s degree in sculpture from Yale in 1985. A professor emerita, she was a faculty member at The Ohio State University from 2001 until 2022. Her art focuses on the sensory aspect of materials and mediums. She has received international acclaim for her huge-scale immersive installations that often invite public engagement, whether through sight, sound or touch. Many of her works are site responsive and incorporate textiles, written and spoken word, people and motion. Her more recent art considers technology’s effects on the individual body and how they can work together in collaboration. One work, the event of a thread (2012), featured a massive silk curtain hung from the ceiling of the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. Ropes and pulleys connected to swings that, when used by the public, would cause the enormous curtain to billow and flow. She participated in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1999 Venice Biennale on behalf of the United States and has commissioned projects for such institutions as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto, Japan.
