Michelle Stuart, Spiral Notebook
Solomon Adler, SFMOMA
December 2020
“How better to know a place than to know the earth of a place?” the artist Michelle Stuart once asked.1 Since the 1970s, Stuart has traveled around the world, exploring sites where history and geology intertwine. For Spiral Notebook (1975), she took earth from the region around the sovereign nation of the Jemez Pueblo—known to Pueblo members as Walatowa—crushed it into a large sheet of heavy paper, and then folded this paper to form a book. The work brings to mind the adobe bricks that have been used in the Southwest for thousands of years, and its encrusted pages evoke a written history of this region told through the land that built it. […]