Fallen Into Language

The Art Academy of Cincinnati presents Fallen Into Language, featuring works by artists Dianna Frid and Will Stovall, curated by Sergio Aguillón-Mata. 

Curatorial Statement About the Exhibition: “The notion of modernity was crowned by an idea of language as the means and limits of human thought. Art faces this conclusion with suspicion, as it expresses and produces thought often without language. And yet, does it? Or is the language used by art simply non-verbalized, grasped only by its formal qualities. Are the brush strokes, the color palette, the balance of the parts in a composed whole, akin to a lexicon and grammar? Is the artistic gesture not a conventional and arbitrary conveyor of non-literal meaning? And conversely, have we forgotten that the written word is also an image? Are we all not condemned by our own faculties to fall into language, regardless our means of expression? This exhibition was curated under the torment of those questions, without preventing any of the selected pieces from speaking on their own. The Art Academy of Cincinnati is honored to present selected works by Dianna Frid and William Stovall.” 

About the Artists and Curator:

Dianna Frid is an artist working at the intersection of material texts and textiles. Her artist’s books and mixed-media works make visible the tactile manifestations of language. In her work, embroidery is a prominent vehicle for exploring the relationships between writing and drawing, and the overlaps of transcription, translation, and legibility. 

Frid was born in Mexico City where she was first exposed to textiles as complex codes of material writing. At the age of fifteen she immigrated, with her family, to Vancouver, Canada. These and other points of reference help her situate her work alongside lineages that embrace art and needlework without framing them in hierarchical opposition. Time, Rhythm, Process, and Matter are never in opposition. 

Frid is Professor in the Art Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has received numerous grants including a 3Arts Award, as well as support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. 

English is Dianna Frid’s stepmother tongue. 

Will Stovall (Ph.D. Yale University, 2018; M.F.A. Bard College, 2025) is an artist based in Washington, DC. His paintings, which center around diagrammatic constructions, explore how individuals exist in natural and societal habitats and how they orient themselves—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—toward larger worlds. He completed a dissertation on the institutional imagination of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, curated exhibitions for the Kreeger Museum and the Phillips Collection, and has given talks on community and political art. His paintings have been featured as cover illustrations for Oxford German Studies and Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. He is the editor of Of the Land: The Art and Poetry of Lou Stovall (Georgetown University Press, 2022). 

Sergio A. Aguillón-Mata is a Mexican-American author and artist. He has published the prose collections Quién escribe (Paisajista) in 2004, Tratado (De una zona privada) in 2014, and Envés in 2016, in the cities of Zacatecas and Monterrey, in Mexico. He has collaborated with numerous printed and electronic literary magazines like Letras Libres, Punto de Partida, and Avispero, in Mexico, and MAKE Literary Magazine in the United States, among many others. He studied philology in the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, and Colmex, and received awards and grants from UNAM, FECAZ, FONCA, CONACYT, and the Mexican Academy of Sciences, in Mexico, and from the DAAD in Germany. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, since the summer of 2012.