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In 2020, artist Tom Burckhardt (American, born 1964) began to create water media and collage drawings on found book pages. Over the last four years, he has created more than five hundred of these drawings. As an artist, Burckhardt has long been interested in “found text”—words that appear on billboards, road signs, or in people’s front yards. This interest is in part a response to his father Rudy Burckhardt’s celebrated photographs of the heavily lettered urban landscape, as well as to the tradition of plein air landscape painting by Maine artists such as Lois Dodd and Alex Katz. Burckhardt is drawn to the way in which words appear in books. He likes to purchase and then unbound old books found in flea markets. He then draws, paints, and creates collages on these loose pages. In doing so, he disrupts and reimagines the meaning of the words on each page. “Old books about art, the social landscape, or self-help books have great chapter headings,” he explains. “But many don’t have any currency now. This work destroys and rescues them at the same time, giving the ideas some juice in today’s context.” This exhibition brings together several hundred of these small drawings to create an immersive environment of connected words, shapes, and color. Burckhardt was born in New York City and graduated in 1986 from SUNY Purchase, where he teaches today.