Alexandra Grant’s Favorite Stories Star Women

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, save for Sophocles and a small cadre of professors, who has thought about Antigone more than Alexandra Grant. Her work has long combined visual art with an exploration of writing and language and “Antigone 3000 (Anakainōsis),” her most recent show, on display at the Albertz Benda gallery until Thursday, is composed of 10 pieces that tell the story of the Greek heroine through paint, collage, and text. “I was with this teenager, this heroine, throughout perimenopause and menopause, so I feel so grateful to her,” Grant says of the iconic character.

In July, Grant’s show “One Star Is Enough to Believe in the Light” will open at the Neues Museum Nürnberg in Nuremberg, Germany. The exhibition focuses on the work of eight German women writers, from a medieval nun to contemporary authors. “It’s really looking at how women have constituted themselves throughout the history of literature and writing,” she says. Grant adds of choosing her subjects, “I love this question of, ‘Who would you invite to a dinner party?’”

Grant, who also runs the publishing company X Artists’ Books with her partner Keanu Reeves, spoke to ELLE about how she found a way to combine literature and art, spending 14 years on one project, and starting another chapter.

What is it like to open a show that you’ve worked on for so long and to see it come to fruition after all these years?

Like any creative process, there are so many sides to it. There’s the part of [finding the idea], which has its own timeframe. Sometimes it’s instant, sometimes it comes over time. Sometimes it’s smooth, sometimes it’s laborious. Then there’s the making [of it], which is the same. Then there’s the putting into the world. In this particular body of work, it really is the end. I’m not going to work with Antigone anymore.

I started in my early forties, and then I finished at 53 working with Antigone. Carrie Mae Weems, Jean Anouilh [who wrote a famous theatrical adaptation], so many great artists and writers have loved Antigone. She grabs your attention for a purpose, for a reason, political and social. Then you work with her in the myth for as long as you go on that journey.

I was with this teenager, this heroine, throughout perimenopause and menopause. I feel so grateful to her. The purpose of the show is to show this rebirth and the management of anger. Anger that was social, civic, about injustice, but was also deeply personal for me.

At 53, I was like, “Maybe it’s time for another chapter.” I was doing a talk and I burst into tears during the conversation because I was like, “Wow, I’ve really been on a journey with this character.”

When did you begin to feel a strong connection to Antigone?

The first time I read Antigone was probably in eighth grade. My mom was a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. We were living in Paris, and we read Anouilh’s French version, [which placed] Antigone as a part of this idea of the resistance to Nazism in France. To first learn the French version, the Anouilh version, before Sophocles, is an interesting journey. I learned how she served different generations.

What is your German show going to look like?

The concept is to present eight women who have a connection to the German language. It’s really looking at how women have constituted themselves throughout the history of literature and writing and then presenting their voices embodied in painting on works on paper. It’s eight women, starting with a medieval nun to contemporary writers.

There’s a romantic poet who was part of a poetry movement called the Blümenorden, a flower order. We have a woman from the modern times who was drinking martinis and popping tranquilizers and doubting motherhood. In World War II, I decided to include Hélène Cixous, who’s known as a French writer or a North African writer, but her mother was German.

Fatma Aydemir, who writes for The Guardian, is a distinguished novelist and playwright. She’s Turkish, Kurdish, German, and is writing about queerness as well as her many countries.

I’m very interested in this history of writing and saying the struggles of women. The struggles of women, without electric light, with electric light, they’re [still] very much the same. They’re about how to live in a world of men and seeing how language affords us identity and dignity and imagination when we don’t have as much power as the other gender.

What materials are you working with?

I’m working with a company here called Hahnemühle, which is an old German paper company. They’ve been going since, I want to say 1568. I went to see the factory and they showed me the spigot where the water has come from for over 500 years.

What’s great about paper is that it responds so beautifully to pencil and ink, but it also has that quality in relationship to writing. And then the first step is researching the writers, finding the texts; this is the publishing side of my brain.

I think you’ll be able to see in the show that the different fonts, the different color choices, each one is so completely different. For Christina Ebner, born in the 13^th century, I sampled her handwriting and created a font based on her manuscripts and then laid out the piece in English and in German.

Has text always been an important part of your work?

I was ultimately raised an only child of a single mom. So that was my upbringing. Choosing to be an artist, which is sort of a wild choice for this following statement, [offered] the stability I wanted. I wanted the freedom, but I also wanted some kind of stability.

When I looked at being an artist, I thought, “God, it’s so fashionable.” What do you do if one year it’s representation and then the next year it’s abstraction? I decided to look at: What do I actually like? What will I like when nobody is there? And what will I like when everyone’s there? And I thought, what if I could base my whole career on literature? If that could be the focus of what I do, then I know that I wouldn’t lose interest.

When you think about literature, you have to understand that there’s such a big world that you will never wrap your head around it. That was very exciting to me. It was about finding a way to participate, a way to always elevate the little me, the version that’s like, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing in life.”

When you’re younger and you make a list of the things you want in life, keeping the learning curve steep was one of mine. But I’ve created an artistic practice where I’ve never run out of things to investigate.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.