Becky,

2000

In 2000, Puryear created a series of ten woodcuts, including the four seen here, for a deluxe edition of Jean Toomer’s lyrical text Cane (1923), a literary classic of the Harlem Renaissance. An innovative mixture of prose, poetry, and drama, Cane is composed of vignettes describing experiences of African Americans in the United States. Puryear first read the book in the early 1970s while he was teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, his first experience as an African American living in the South. Titled after female characters in the book, these prints reflect Puryear’s interest in biomorphic forms that hover between recognizable and abstract imagery. Like Toomer’s language, Puryear’s lines swell and sway with life, and forms merge as if bodies in motion.