Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present words doing as they want to do, an exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Eve Fowler. The installation brings together sixteen new paintings, an artist’s book, a related portfolio of screenprints, and an audio work that expand on the artist’s ongoing engagement with archives, queer and feminist history, and the intersections of memory, poetry, and visual art.

words doing as they want to do was conceived as a multiphase exhibition with staggered openings: first at Gordon Robichaux as an installation of paintings and a large artist’s book displayed on a table, before traveling to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where it will be on view from February to June. Fowler has distinct installations for each venue, where the different arrangements and contexts will recast text, image, and meaning. Following the relocation of the paintings to Radcliffe, the exhibition at Gordon Robichaux will continue as a sound installation featuring audio of artists and writers from Fowler’s community reading many of the poems that inspired this body of work.

Fowler’s new artworks are informed by her ongoing research and engagement with personal and literary archives, most recently the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University and during her residency at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. References to queer writers, poets, and activists appear throughout the exhibition, among them H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, (1886–1961) and her partner Silvia Dobson (1908–1993), June Jordan (1936–2002), Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), and James Merrill (1926–1995), as well as Gerturde Stein (1874–1946), whose biography and inventive use of language have been central to Fowler’s practice over the past fifteen years. Together, Fowler’s works engage language and images as a site of resistance and remembrance.

The exhibition’s title, words doing as they want to do, is inspired by a line from a lecture Stein presented at the University of Chicago in 1935 (1); the phrase also appears in an eponymous painting in the exhibition. Here, the artist has assembled the text on a brilliant blue background, each word painted in a different font and size and organized as a vertical stack. The phrase has appeared as a refrain throughout Fowler’s work: in paintings, screenprinted t-shirts, posters, and a vinyl record. For the artist, “words doing as they want to do” is an aesthetic and political framework that speaks to the simultaneous freedom and constraint of expression—particularly within queer histories.

The paintings in the exhibition are unified through a shared visual vocabulary of graphic text, shapes, and images created through a combination of paint and screenprinting on fifteen 18-by-18-inch canvases and one 28-by-35-inch painting scaled to the size of a Ouija board. Fowler applies her distinct palette—ivory, saffron, grey, pink, magenta, and bright blue—with Flashe paint, a matte surface that flattens and compresses the distinct elements. Fragments of language pulse between reading and seeing, and the serial format invites relationships of association and difference. The paintings hang together in the room like unbound pages from a book, each with its own interiority and relationship to the group as a whole.

Many of the works incorporate references to queer poets and writers and reanimate their coded voices. Mirror for a star. Star for a mirror. is a magenta canvas with screenprinted images and text the artist encountered during her research into H.D.’s life at the Beinecke. Fowler overlays images of the poet’s death mask with pages from Silvia Dobson’s document chronicling her intimate relationship with H.D. Together, the text and painting provide a queer context for H.D.’s life and work otherwise omitted in historical accounts.

The possibility of you asleep and breathing (June Jordan) draws the viewer into a section of text from Jordan’s “Poem for My Love,” which describes the intimate experience of observing a loved one breathing while asleep. Fowler’s painting is a visual rearrangement of the poem within an ivory silhouette that loosely resembles a tombstone or page torn from a book. The artist’s disruptive spacing of the text creates a visual puzzle that slows and expands reading. In Roll back your eyes, a pool, Fowler emphasizes queer sensuality with a stanza from Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Mayakovsky.” The painting reimagines the text as a repeated phrase set within a square formation that invites the viewer to engage in the optical play of decoding O’Hara’s language.

A single rectangular painting in the exhibition, Ouija, reproduces James Merrill’s hand-drawn spirit board layered with one of his letters that Fowler discovered in the Beinecke. Between 1955 and 1975, Merrill and his romantic partner, David Jackson, used the board to transcribe their conversations with ghosts, angels, and historical figures. Merrill incorporated the material into his 560-page epic poem, “The Changing Light at Sandover,” which he performed at the Radcliffe Institute theater in 1990.

Two paintings dedicated to Robert White, Double R Pink and Double R Yellow, juxtapose various arrangements and colorways of the letter “R” over a triangle. The silhouetted shapes are activated by their eccentric geometries and are restorative invocations of White’s activism and legacy. A gay man who lived and worked in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, Fowler encountered his story during her research for a walking tour of historical queer spaces. White was a community activist and owner of the Frog Pond, a queer cabaret and restaurant where he championed young artists by exhibiting their work. In 1980, the establishment was the target of a violent, homophobic act: an unidentified person hurled a firebomb into the Frog Pond and yelled out: “Die faggots!.” The blast injured three people, inspired the formation of a neighborhood alliance, and was one in a series of events that led to White’s suicide in 1985 (2).

Several of the paintings center Fowler’s own experiences and serve as meditations on transience and memory. December 7, 2025 includes an excerpt of the artist’s daily journal layered with an image of a balloon that Fowler photographed at a 2005 New Year’s Eve party. These elements are screenprinted over a blue triangle and draw the viewer into a close inspection of the text. Snail (Self-Portrait) features a single image of a mollusk that the artist photographed in her backyard. Printed in black ink on a deep green canvas, the painting evokes the artist’s insistence on slowed observation and reflection.

Snow Angel is the most minimal and mysterious work in the exhibition: a nearly monochromatic grey canvas with a faint image of the artist’s mother in the snow. She died prematurely when Fowler was seven years old, and the painting memorializes this formative loss and the profound resonance of memory with images and text. Fowler recalls, “My earliest experiences of poetry were shaped by my mother’s love of language and reading. She had vinyl records of poetry—she played T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland,” regularly. After she died, I misplaced the record but continued to revisit it—poetry and reading are ways of feeling connected to her and to queer history.”

1. Gertrude Stein, “Lecture 1,” Narration: Four Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15.