ANDOVER.- The Addison Gallery of American Art presents the exhibit Wendy Ewald : American Alphabets through December 31. For almost thirty years, artist Wendy Ewald has challenged traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Exploring the visual imagination of children and adults around the world, her collaborative approach to photography probes questions of identity and cultural differences.

In 1997, the artist embarked on a series titled American Alphabets, designed to look at our written language from various cultural perspectives. With Ewald working behind the camera, each project involved students choosing a word for a letter of the alphabet and then determining how to depict those words. To date, Ewald has worked with students to create Spanish, African- American, Arab-American, and White Girl alphabets. Raising provocative questions about contemporary society and the power of language, the alphabets included in this exhibition allow us to see ourselves and the issues of race and culture in a new light.

“My first encounter with language was the alphabet printed in children’s alphabet books. In retrospect, I understand that the words and visual examples these books used to represent letters—a picture of a shiny new car, say, for the letter C—affirmed the world view of the white middle-class girl I happened to be. I grew up assuming that this conformity of written expression to one’s world held true for all children.”—Wendy Ewald

In one of the artist’s book, Wendy Ewald (Secret Games, Scalo, 2000), a conceptual photographer, investigates the ability of language to create barriers or alliances between groups according to gender, age, and race. In collaboration with children she created four alphabets: a Spanish alphabet with English-as-a-Second-Language students in North Carolina, an African-American alphabet with students at an elementary school in Cleveland, a White-Girls alphabet at a boarding school in Massachusetts, and an Arabic alphabet with students at a middle school in Queens, New York. The book combines language with photographic images allowing us to see ourselves in a fresh light!

These projects confirmed the vivid tensions between our formal “ruling” language and the valence of language for people who do not share many assumptions of the general culture. They underlined the way in which the alphabet, the literal font of our literacy, expands our understanding of the self.