Public Papers
an exhibition by Toby Altman
on view: November 13 – December 19
opening reception and reading: Friday, November 13, 6pm
open gallery hours: Wednesdays 5-7p, Saturdays 1-3p
What happens when we invite the land to read the poetry that we write upon it? Public Papers poses this question, bringing poetry into intimate contact with the land and ecology of Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan. In April 2026, the poet Toby Altman travelled across the Midwest, burying packets of his poems in friends’ yards. In August, he returned and dug them up. This exhibit documents the process and displays the results. This gesture emerges from—and extends—Altman’s 2026 book, Jewel Box. Jewel Box is a lyric study of the architect Louis Sullivan. Sullivan is often understood to inaugurate a specifically American style of architecture. Lewis Mumford, for instance, describes him as “the first architect in America to come to know himself with any fullness in relation to his soil, period, and civilization.”
But Sullivan consistently fails to acknowledge the history of genocide and dispossession that made his architecture possible. His architectural innovations come at the cost of a full reckoning with his “soil, period, and civilization.” In this respect, Sullivan is not alone: as Altman writes in Jewel Box, “Sullivan and I have different ideological relationships with colonialism. We have the same material relationship to it…My life is part of the colony’s life. Likewise, the beauty that has nourished me.” Public Papers does not propose to heal the wounds of colonialism. But it does try to articulate an alternate logic by which we might engage with this place—the Midwest, the United States—and its history. In response to Sullivan’s mystifications of the conditions of his “soil, period, and civilization,” this exhibit offers a literal engagement between soil and poem, building and history, past and present.
ARTIST BIO: Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2026), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from the Graham Foundation, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University.