Renee Gladman & Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence

A sumptuous artist’s book of acclaimed writer Renee Gladman’s fantastical drawings that merge writing and architecture, with a response from Fred Moten

Since 2013, poet, novelist, essayist and artist Renee Gladman (born 1971)―author of the acclaimed Ravickians novels―has been doing a kind of asemic writing that is also at once drawing and architecture (some of this work was published as Prose Architectures in 2017). Printed in white ink on black, with a beautiful embroidered cover, One Long Black Sentence brings together these drawings with a text by New York–based theorist and poet Fred Moten (born 1962) to form a sumptuous artist’s book in which drawing becomes an architecture for thought, for what writing looks like from the inside out.

Fred Moten’s “Anindex” pushes the index beyond its utilitarian conventions. At times riffing on the architectonics of Gladman’s illustrations, Moten’s associative poetic prose points toward the structuring imposition or emergence of sentences as the marks and forms of thought.