Hen Eys Tru Ile

Peter Gourfain, artist

born 1934

Hen Eys Tru Ile, 1993

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: linocut

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 520 x 381 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 660 x 510 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 20 1/2 x 15 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 26 x 20 1/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 30 x 24 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund

Accession number: 2002.0019

Not on display

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Label texts

Brosseau Center for Learning: Disability Visibility: In Conversation with the 2022–2023 KU Common Book

Language and communication fascinates social activist Peter Gourfain. The title of this work comes from this print’s second column of letters. The letters, when read from left to right and top to bottom, offer the proverb: “When money speaks truth is silent.” The heads in the four corners of the image contain hands signing the word FEAR in the American Manual Alphabet.

Exhibition Label:
"Printed Art and Social Radicalism," Jun-2002, Stephen Goddard
Peter Gourfain has been a social activist his entire career. He is fascinated by language and has developed his own alphabet (used here in his signature), and many of his works incorporate palindromes, words or phrases that read the same backward as forward. The title of this work is culled from the apparent random vertical sorting of one row of letters, which, when read in normal sequence offer the proverb: “When money speaks truth is silent.” The four corner heads are inhabited by signing hands that spell out F-E-A-R.