Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 6

Born 1939 in New York, NY
Died 1996 in eastern Pennsylvania

N. H. Pritchard is known primarily as a concrete poet who arranged words spatially across the page. The Biennial exhibits for the first time works that combine his innovative poetry with his dynamic, colorful drawings, including his monumental twenty-two-page visual art text Mundus: A Novel (1970). Pritchard was a member of Umbra, a collective of Black writers active within the Lower East Side experimental poetry scene who merged poetics and activism that included Steve Cannon (whose work also appears in the Biennial), Ishmael Reed, and Askia Touré. Pritchard was also a fixture at Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern, where he spent time with painters such as Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston. Pritchard experienced a fundamental shift in his work in 1967 when he encountered what he termed the transreal. As he elaborated in an unpublished video from 1981: “I feel there is one reality, and that reality is God; everything else is actual or what I call transreal.” This concept would manifest in his writing and drawings, symbolized by the shape of a circle.