Mining My Ántonia; Excerpts, Drawings, and a Map by Barbara Tetenbaum

This project is the second in a series of artworks stemming from the experience of reading Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia. In the summer of 2010 I spent a month in the gallery at Reed College listening to a recording of Willa Cather's 1918 novel, My Ántonia. I had wanted to put myself in the position of a first-time reader and respond to the story however it moved me. I assumed I would draw directly on the walls as I listened and that this would be the basis for the exhibition. Instead I was amazed and captivated by the pure gorgeousness of Cather's writing. What took me by surprise was how emotional this experience became. Listening each day to her descriptions of the landscape and the sky brought me to tears, the kind that have no root in sadness or nostalgia but came from a place deep in my being. I surrendered myself to her words, retyping excerpts onto many scraps of paper and pinning them to the walls of the gallery or suspending them from fishing line for viewers to bump int