We reflect our world view through our letters*: hornbooks with their religious catechisms; moralizing Victorian alphabet books; and the racist ABC in Dixie. Knowing this, authors and artists use alphabets to disrupt the status quo and raise moral and social concerns: conspiracy paranoia, endangered animals, sexism and racism. [Links in the captions will take you to more images and details.]
Doing the work of learning the ABCs or the International Code of Signals is about memorizing. Doing the work with Mourning/Warning: An Abecedarian (2015) is about memorializing. It signals a warning to present dangers.
In light of Tia Blassingame’s Mourning/Warning, can Louise & George Bonte’s ABC In Dixie (1900?) be simply dismissed as an anachronism?
Wendy Ewald’s American Alphabets (2005) offers a hopeful view and reminder that there is more than one alphabet.
If all alphabets have a world view, can an alphabet be bent and arranged into a new world view? In 2018, the Nova Scotia Chapter of the Global Afrikan Congress facilitated a “book-in-a-day” event to help the children of Halifax create R is for Reparations (2019), which answers that question.
Celebrating role models is another tool in the alphabet-book box for changing world views. In ABCs That Look Like You And Me (2020), the artist Ja’nai Harris uses featureless but allusive portraits onto which the reader is invited to project his or her own features.
Now that A is for Apple Inc. rather than the fruit, Bård Ionson wonders, “What are our children learning as they navigate digital devices vs. when children used wooden tablets with narrow ideas presented with pictograms.” Battledore (2019) explores the implications by using an Augmented Reality app to plunge the viewer into the digital realm.
In Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet (2016), David McLimans redraws the alphabet’s capital letters to look like animals not yet extinct but on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
In Rescuing Q (2023), Suzanne Moore uses her beautiful calligraphy to disassociate the letter Q from QAnon, misinformation and conspiracy-thinking, and restore it to open-minded, open-hearted questions.
Tupoka Ogette’s Ein rassismuskritisches Alphabet (2022) presents another attempt at changing world views — in whatever country they arise.
And sometimes it’s good just to reverse-appropriate “the” alphabet, which Arial Robinson does in The Modern Day Black Alphabet (2020) with joy and pride.
Return to List of Displays in Alphabets Alive!
*David Blamires, Alphabet Books: Catalogue of an exhibition held in the Deansgate Building of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (Manchester: John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1987), p. 3. ” All alphabets construct a world view”. —
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