Houstonia’s The Must List tells you about something going on in Houston that you absolutely cannot miss.

Text belongs on gallery walls. It forms one of the core visual elements in Cy Twombly’s style. It helped drive home Andy Warhol’s themes that commercial graphic design is in and of itself a form of art. And now, two exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center in the Museum District explore the relationship between words, visuals, and human experiences of creation, grief, and reflection.

This is the last week to catch the shows before the holidays. They will run until December 21, with a closing event scheduled on January 8 and an artist walk-through on January 9.

Roslyn M. Dupré’s The daily devotional and Jean Shon’s in a word put text front and center. The former involves a series of paperback pages used as canvasses, and is displayed both on and along the stairwell, forming what the artist refers to as an “artery that flows upwards.” Such biological imagery is further underscored by the bright red frames housing Dupré’s works. It gracefully gives way to in a word, on view in the upstairs gallery, where Shon collects and finds inspiration in family ephemera.

“We’re definitely keeping in mind that these artists are, by the nature of being installed and showing together, in dialogue together,” says Anna Walker, Lawndale’s executive director.

The daily devotional starts off said discussion with a look at Dupré’s thoughts and creative inclinations during COVID-19. She reread Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain during that time, a prescient choice she refers to as “really creepy and uncomfortable” because its plot entails the outbreak and containment of a deadly extraterrestrial virus. One of Dupré’s creative routines involves reading in her studio, then tearing out the pages she’s completed to use in her multimedia sculptures.

“I often set myself to the challenge, or the exercise, of waking up every morning when I go into my studio and doing the same thing for a long period of time,” says Dupré, who is based in Houston. “It’s meant to refer to the body and to the way we approach faith and prayer sometimes, where we just do things on blind commitment to a process that we think will take us somewhere else. I don’t know why I’m making things. I am committed to making it, and I just do it and do it and do it, and I’ll have my reasons for each piece. But there is a bit of unknowing in the effort.”

This exhibition collects about 40 of the 80 works she created during the period in which she read and remixed, as it were, Andromeda Strain. Around March 2020, Dupré began diligently taking one page out of the paperback per day, then reworking it into an art piece. Some days, she would sew eye-catching designs directly onto the page. Others, she would cut and paste different pages together into a collage, or deconstruct them into strips and weave them together. One day even involved sewing a spray of her grandmother’s mother-of-pearl buttons directly onto a page, a shout out to one of Dupré’s major influences, Lenore Tawney.

She started weaning off the one-per-day schedule around July 2020, after which she created pieces as the inspiration struck. What she read directly impacted how she decided to approach working with the page.

“As I was working through [The daily devotional], I was thinking about the words. Some of these works, I’m grabbing words off the page and reworking sentences or sentence structures,” Dupré says. “Other ones, I’m thinking about the actual act of sewing, and I’m ripping them apart and making Frankenpages or thinking about how the words can be manipulated into a form.”

She points to one such “Frankenpage,” an assemblage of cutouts sewn to create a papery quilt, plumped up with stuffing. It’s tempting to want to poke at the bulges, though the frames prevent such a thing. Another favorite of hers uses the first page of Andromeda Strain’s epilogue, stitched up with what she calls “wonky circles” that reflect the tension she felt while reading that specific part of the novel.

“When I did a studio visit with [Dupré], I saw [The daily devotional] in person and saw the variation that can still happen within sort of a constrained framework, which is those pages from the novel and the red thread [used in her sewing],” says Jeremy Johnson, Lawndale’s operations and exhibitions manager. “And then the use of the text and playing with the text to create new messages, hint at things, obscure things. I think that’s what resonated for me.”

At the end of The daily devotional, before visitors see Shon’s works, Dupré’s frenetic journey up the stairs culminates in a tableau involving a prie-dieu (a piece of furniture for kneeled prayers) and a soft-sculpted scourge recalling mortification of the flesh rituals. In this, the artist completes her commentary on the inherent interplay between masochism and faith in the creative process. She also allows the Andromeda Strain text to give way to prayers, a fitting conclusion to the show that directly addresses Shon’s layered examination of grief and loss.

in a word collects stamps, letters, photos, notebooks, and other materials from her family’s archives. Much like Dupré, Shon works in the multimedia space, remixing these pieces into art objects that simultaneously comment on the original text while also bringing in new perspectives. She lost her father in 2016, and the collection presented an opportunity to piece together some closure.

“My reasoning for going through this and creating it is to learn more about my father. But in that process, it is also finding that there’s a lot of more questions that I have,” says Shon, who grew up in Galveston County and now lives in Tallahassee. “I’m also working with my mother, who helps me with translations and things like that, and bringing a lot of voices together.”

The striking centerpiece of in a word at first appears as a series of blank sheets of paper framed on Lawndale’s walls. But as one approaches the works, handwritten text begins to appear embossed onto the fibers. Shon took passages from her father’s notes and college essays and preserved them as wisps of remembrance.

“I was really interested in using a medium that felt kind of ghostly. A lot of this work has this presence of haunting, things that are not quite present, but they’re there. In a lot of my work, I’m looking at traces or things that have been left behind, things that often go unnoticed,” the artist says. “With those pieces, I was interested in the way that some of the things he approached were crossed out and unfinished and sort of, like him questioning himself, which I think brings questions to the viewer.”

in a word takes its name from one such embossed work, titled A Different Life: In a Word, underscoring Shon’s overarching reflections on how to kickstart visual memories using nothing but text.

When the separate showcases are viewed as a unit, Shon and Dupré’s individual visions begin converging. Both evoke the paradoxical reality of creation and grief, processes that vacillate between extremes of isolation and community. The artists also reflect inward on their own thought processes using text as the basis for their inspiration, with the aesthetic potential of letters as their shared conduit. A journey from The daily devotional’s invocations to the creation’s improvisational whims literally lifts visitors into the terrestrial afterlife of in a word.

“You have to engage with the works intimately, because it’s a narrow stairwell with the works all around you, even on the floor. Even when you look up, there’s more of the work,” says Emily Fens, assistant director at Lawndale. “You finally get to the stairwell, looking back down, and then you go back to another exhibition.”

Dupré herself suggested the stairs as her ideal show space, allowing the two exhibitions to informally merge and solidifying their ultimate harmony. It’s a thoughtful, out-of-the-box approach to a more traditional gallery set-up.

“Both shows are very personal to the artists, what they were going through at the time of making. This very quiet show from Jean that’s very personal about her dad’s immigration experience. It just leads to a contemplative space when I think about the themes,” Johnson says. “Roslyn’s of devotion and transcendence, and then the way that Jean displays text and transforms it. To me, they both do that.”