Art Exhibition Reading Group

Join a gathering to read and converse about texts selected to accompany Dianna Frid’s exhibition Dianna Frid: Matter Is the Nectar of Writing / La materia es el néctar de la escritura. The texts will be made available. Register to participate.

Featuring new and recent tapestries, artist’s books, embroideries, photographs, mixed-media works, and sculpture, this exhibition is the U.S. premiere of a group of works that Frid created in Mexico and Chicago from 2023 to 2025. In 2025, most of these artworks were exhibited in concurrent exhibitions at two libraries in Oaxaca, Mexico: the Biblioteca Andrés Henestrosa and the Biblioteca Fray Francisco de Burgoa (Burgoa Library). Related works from 2015 through 2025 are also included in the exhibition at University Galleries.

Frid was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Vancouver with her family as a teenager. She has lived in Chicago since 2001. Being from three countries and speaking two languages influences her work in multiple ways. In her words, her work “makes visible the tactile manifestations of language … exploring the relationships between writing and drawing, and the overlaps of transcription, translation, and legibility.” The exhibition title addresses Frid’s ongoing interest in untranslatability between languages and between the linguistic and the non-verbal. In Spanish, materia has two meanings: both subject and matter. And while nectar is a sugary fluid produced by plants to attract pollinators, in Greek mythology, it is the drink of the gods linked to immortality. Throughout her explorations of texts and textiles, Frid combines and re-combines materials—including mica, iron oxide, gold leaf, obsidian, pochote, and cochineal—to address time, transformation, process, pleasure, and geological forces.