Alice Attie

Alice Attie (b. 1950) is an artist and writer whose work grows from a deep engagement with language, literature, and thought. Born and raised in New York, she studied French literature at Barnard College before earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and an M.F.A. in poetry. She taught literature throughout the New York area for many years, employing a scholarly sensitivity in her visual practice. Attie is best known for her intricate ink drawings; her pieces are meditations on repetition where she builds dense fields of numbers, letters, invented scripts, and small figures. Her pieces, therefore, hover between legibility and abstraction. This dialogue is central to her celebrated Class Notes series, in which she transforms lecture notes from seminars in physics and philosophy into a visual experience that mirrors the flow and complexity of thought itself.

A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant in 2015 and 2023, her photographs and works on paper are held in prestigious collections, including The Whitney Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum in New York, The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among others. Her latest book of poetry, Maybe, was published in 2026 by Seagull Books.