Artwork Description
Sheryl Oring – Writer’s Block, a suite of twenty lithographs
Dimensions: 15 x 15″ framed
Year: 2003
Medium: color lithograph
Edition: LP4
Sheryl Oring makes a powerful statement about censorship with her Writer’s Block series. A renowned performance and social activist artist,Oring gathered hundreds of typewriters from the 1920s and 30s, then “incarcerated” them in rusty steel cages. She placed her Writer’s Block works on the Berlin site where Nazis burned books and destroyed the works of great authors such as Nelly Sachs and Bertolt Brecht. Her works honor the great writers whose books were burned by Nazis; yet they also remind us of the censorship that is rampant in schools across the United States today. The lithographic suite seems to express yearning to communicate, but with words that can not be completed.