Alternate Projects is pleased to present the catalog, Visualizing Text: Experimental Poetry and Conceptual Text 1960–1990. This curated selection features books, serial publications, broadsides, prints, ephemera, and singular works that explore the radical terrain of language, form, and visuality. Drawing from a dynamic threedecade span, the collection highlights artists and poets who challenged the conventional boundaries of poetry and text, turning language into material, concept, and image.

Between 1960 and 1990, experimental poetry and conceptual text flourished as both a literary and visual phenomenon. Reacting to the formalism of earlier modernist traditions, these practitioners embraced a more open, interdisciplinary approach—merging typography, performance, politics, and graphic design. The result was a,body of work that was often playful, irreverent, and deeply engaged with contemporary culture and media.

Visual and concrete poetry, mail art, typewriter experiments, and textual interventions emerged across global avant-garde circles—from Fluxus and Lettrism to Latin American visual poetry movements—creating an international conversation around the materiality of language. Artists and poets like Hanne Darboven, Dick Higgins, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, and many others reimagined what a poem could look like and how a text could behave.

The works gathered in “Visualizing Text” span a rich diversity of practices and voices—some well-known, others lesser recognized but equally groundbreaking. Whether subverting linguistic norms or amplifying the political power of the printed word, each piece reflects the spirit of experimentation and conceptual rigor that defined this era.

This catalog celebrates not only the works themselves, but also the ephemeral, often fugitive nature of the communities and ideas they represent. Through these texts and images, we invite you to explore a period when poetry left the page, and language became both action and artifact.