Doris Cross at Charlotte Jackson

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Arden Reed

A student of Hans Hofmann in the 1920s and '30s, Doris Cross became a suburban housewife who made art on the side, showing occasionally at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 1972 she left New York for Santa Fe, where she became a salty doyenne in avant-garde circles. A decade after Cross's death, Charlotte Jackson has exhibited a selection of the artist's "Dictionary Columns," mixed-medium works, mostly on vertical paper (25 by 17 to 13 by 5 inches), from the 1970s and '80s.

Cross's central achievement, "Dictionary Columns" began one day in 1965, when she chanced to open a 1913 Webster's Secondary School Dictionary. For no clear reason, she recalled, "Certain words just came out, and they worked together to my mind." Intervening directly on the pages of the Webster's, Cross left intact these words (or letters or phrases) precisely as she found them and blotted out the rest. Fond of multiples and variations, she sometimes photocopied and enlarged pages or flipped them to create white lettering on a black background.

Cross was after a kind of logic that, she believed, inhered in words themselves. Obscuring most of a page would reveal hidden meanings by freeing the remaining words from their prosaic roles to join other isolated words and form concrete poetry. Given their irregular spacing, these "poems" work as visual compositions, which Cross embellished with collage (including dictionary illustrations) and gouache, and by coloring the sheets in saturated blues, greens, rusts. Words function as images, and images form poems. We experience each "Dictionary Column" both sequentially, moving down the page, and by freely scanning the field. And Cross's "columns" are architectural as well: they have capitals (boldface title words) and bases (pronunciation guides running along the bottom), between which, as she said, "words support words, even as a column is built of mortar and stones."

The artist produced many lovely passages, whose form a review cannot reproduce: "the place where, or wherein/a word in that case/A lake/a bay or arm/A/ringlet of hair/A fastening/a door/locking" (from Living Lock, 1982). These poetic fragments are embedded in painterly contexts whose styles range from the intentionally childlike to Art Nouveau, from sparse to stuffed and which may recall Blake, Tenniel or Surrealist juxtapositions. Occasionally, erotic associations flesh out dry dictionary bones, as with iris diagrams in Flower Fluting (1988). Endemic to this work is the difficulty of striking the right balance between visual and verbal, such that neither predominates. In this show, we see Cross repeatedly finding that point.--Arden Reed