ATLANTA, GA.- Cristin Tierney Gallery announces Tim Youd's exhibition Striking Characters: Typewriters, Literary Worlds, and The Art of Tim Youd at the Michael C. Carlos Museum.

Striking Characters: Typewriters, Literary Worlds, and the Art of Tim Youd, opening on August 27, 2025, in Woodruff Library’s Schatten Gallery, explores how the typewriter has sparked the cultural imagination and radically transformed storytelling, literature, and visual art over nearly two centuries.

This exhibition takes seemingly disparate works created on a typewriter—a typescript draft of The Wiz, a retyped diptych of An American Marriage, Vietnam-era protest flyers made by Emory students, first editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—and puts them in conversation with one another and with the works of LA-based performance artist Tim Youd.

The show sets the vast riches of Emory Libraries' literary archives and the performance and visual art of Youd in dialogue with one another to highlight the ways that the historical record inspires art, and conversely, how art gives new life to the historical record. Featuring literary archives from the Stuart A. Rose Library and Tim Youd’s distinctive performance and visual art—including “diptychs” produced during live novel typing performances, typewriter ribbon-inspired visual art and sculpture—Striking Characters demonstrates that the typewriter is not only a tool for efficient writing, but a technology that empowered a new age of storytelling, imaginative expression, and political resistance from the 19th century onward.

Tim Youd (b. 1967, Worcester, MA) is a performance and visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and video. To date, he has retyped 83 novels at various locations in the United States and Europe. Residencies at historic writers’ homes have included William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with the University of Mississippi Art Museum (Oxford, MS), Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia with SCAD (Milledgeville and Savannah, GA), Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House (Rodmell, Sussex), and at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, NE. His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including at Atlanta Contemporary, CAM St. Louis, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, New Orleans Museum of Art, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. He has presented and performed his 100 Novels Project at the Ackland Art Museum, Art Omi, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Monterey Museum of Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and LAXART, and retyped Joe Orton’s Collected Plays at The Queen’s Theatre with MOCA London. Youd’s performances have been reviewed by The New York Times, Artforum, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, The Art Newspaper, Interview, and various other national and international publications. In 2026, Youd will have an exhibition and performance cycle at the Parrish Art Museum. His studio is based in Los Angeles.