Through Lines | Reciprocity in Text and Image

Jan 16 to 31 | Northlight Gallery

Opening reception | Jan 16 | 6 to 9 p.m.

In 2023 and 2024, artist Julie Anand and writer Sally Ball were awarded an IHR Seed Grant in support of their own visio-textual collaboration. Their work together led them to increasingly integrated team-taught courses, including the workshop-style class held in Fall 2025, “Collaboration: Visual Art & Creative Writing.”

At the beginning of the semester, visual artists and writers were placed in collaborative groups determined by their unique interests and insights. Over the course of several months, our writers and artists worked alongside one another to develop work from their collective imagination. Some wrote and created as though through echolocation, a call and response to one another’s work, while some composed in tandem, crossing the boundaries of their genre.

“Through Lines: Reciprocity in Text & Image” brings together new collaborative works by graduate students in Arizona State University’s Creative Writing and Visual Arts MFA programs. Moving across poetry, prose, photography, printmaking, installation and hybrid forms, this exhibition explores how text and image can listen to, lean on and transform one another. This show is not defined by any thematic element connecting each of its pieces, but rather the possibility that lies in human-to-human connection. 

Each piece in this exhibition is the result of compromise, conversation and reciprocity—the imperfect and messy reality of creating alongside others: retellings of mythologies and archetypes that reveal the human condition; contemplations on survival after loss; the reenactment of shame; even a high-stakes card game. “Through Lines” offers a new invitation to the page, the canvas, the screen, the plinth—and a tender practice of caretaking across time and space. These are the products of what it means to be co-creators, working alongside one another in community.
 

Participating artists: Shipra Agarwal, Julie Anand, Sally Ball, Marina Basu, Adia Robinson Butler, Chris Du, Katie Grierson, Jace Hermanto, Celina Hernandez, Dawn Kushner, Isabel Lanzetta, Argent Martinez Brito, Oscar Montes, Maura O’Dea, Hannah Palmisano, Lily Regalia, Brennie Shoup, Lauren Stevens, Annie Stutzman, Heather Weller, Max Wheeler, Zêdan Xelef.