Peter Gourfain
United States, born 1934 Hen Eys Tru Ile, 1993
Linoleum cut on handmade paper
Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund, 2002.0019
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.
