With this expansive, mirrored double portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Helen Keller, Bramblett explores the radical ways each figure used language and the senses as tools of self-expression. The profile at left is Keller, an author, political activist, and lecturer; at right is Duchamp, the father of conceptual art. Duchamp often used puns and other inversions of letters and phrases to examine the ability and limits of language to convey meaning. Keller, who was blind and deaf, used touch, taste, and smell to help her communicate. Across the surface of the work, a passage from Keller’s Analogies in Sense Perception is written in braille: “I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grapefruit. I can also conceive that colors have shades, and guess what shades are. In smell and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I call them shades.”
Raised in Wedowee, Alabama, Bramblett received his BFA from the University of Georgia and his MFA from Yale University. He worked as a professor of art in the Painting and Drawing department at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art for almost forty years, helping build the school as we know it today. Over the course of his career, he experimented with unorthodox materials and transformations caused by water, wind, temperature change, and motion to create a body of work that is visually and conceptually diverse. Bramblett received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. His work has been shown in Philadelphia—including at Woodmere—and at some of New York’s most prestigious galleries.
