I have asked myself: “Can a sentence be haunted? And if so, by what?”

By Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Emerson Contemporary has commissioned a public art campaign by Kameelah Jana Rasheed where she responds to Boston’s memorial landscape exploring the layered histories of the Boston Common. Rasheed will expand her textual practice by animating the typographical history of this region to create a library of typefaces – fragments (letters, textures) of language. These fragments will be interwoven or sampled into digital designs and animated poems and displayed on digital signage situated around Emerson’s campus. 

Rasheed studies, documents, annotates, and creates texts. Beyond the content, she is interested in the materiality of text and language across different substrates (or compositional fields), or how text shows up across geological features, physical architecture, and in printed matter.