The work of artist-architect-poet Madeline Gins (1941–2014) is rarely shown. Her collaborations with her husband Shusaku Arakawa, under the moniker Arakawa+Gins, are well-known, but her own independent practice—across visual art, performance, poetry, film, and scientific research—was visionary and remains underexplored.

Madeline used language and wordplay to disorient the viewer. Her paintings and drawings contain fantastical elements like biomorphic shapes, disembodied sensory organs, and dream-like vignettes. Nonsensical, playful, and anti-rational, her work refused to be constrained by the bounds of reality and dismantled configurations between body, mind, and surroundings. Madeline sought to stretch the bounds of consciousness and pave the way for new modes of thinking.

This event comes in three parts:

First, artist and educator Aviva Silverman evokes Madeline through a lecture about language empires, discussing her neologisms and vernacular. Aviva worked directly with Madeline at her studio between 2011 and 2014.

Then, poet, performer, and artist Pamela Sneed reads from Madeline's book What the President Will Say and Do!! (Station Hill Press, 1984), published the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected. The book shuffles between poems allegedly written by past presidents like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter; playful aphorisms like “LOWER THE BIRTH AGE” and “VERTEBRA TO OPERATE AS ESCALATORS!”; and instructions \\\[IN CASE OF WAR\\\], including “Keep rowboat behind ear” and “All guns must be boomerangs!”

Finally, Aviva and Pamela join curator Charlotte Youkilis for a discussion about Gins and her legacy.