We were honored to be invited by the Wichita Art Museum to design a commemorative emblem marking the museum’s 90th anniversary. From the outset, our goal was to create a visually striking, richly layered work that captures the depth and vibrancy of WAM’s renowned collection of American art. Drawing from the museum’s visual language, we composed a tapestry of intricate patterns and iconic silhouettes—evoking the joy, wonder, and historical resonance that define the institution’s enduring legacy.
social sonnet
We were honored to join the Ulrich Homegrown exhibition (January - June 2025) presented in partnership with Harvester Arts—an invitation to create a new work in response to two pieces from the Ulrich Museum’s permanWe were honored to participate in the Ulrich Homegrown exhibition (January–June 2025), presented in partnership with Harvester Arts—an invitation to create a new work in response to two pieces from the Ulrich Museum of Art’s permanent collection:
🔴 Untitled (Flag) by Barbara Kruger
🔴 Study for Pact by Natalie Frank
Kruger’s declarative questions and Frank’s expressive, layered figures immediately resonated with us. Set against the backdrop of an approaching election, their works echoed themes of power, identity, and tension—concerns that closely parallel our own collaborative practice as twins.
Reimagining the Sonnet as a Visual Form
In response, we turned to the sonnet—not only for its poetic lineage, but for its structure, rhythm, and inherent doubleness. We translated the fourteen-line form into a visual grid: each line, traditionally composed of ten syllables, became a row of ten visual cells, generating 280 modules in total. This numerical framework became our organizing system, echoing the architecture of twinship—a shared origin, two distinct voices, bound by one structure.
Constrained by the exhibition’s format (24 inches × 10 feet), we chose unity over division, merging what might have been two twin-sized panels into a single vertical composition.
Making the Social Sonnet
Our process began with collecting visual language from both source works—selecting colors, punctuation marks, symbols, and words that reverberated across Kruger’s bold typographic interventions and Frank’s charged figuration.
One question stood out: “WHO?”
It appears in both artists’ work—and it is a question we have been asked all our lives. Who’s who? Sometimes posed with curiosity, sometimes with confusion, the repetition became a kind of drumbeat: an insistent call to examine how identity, power, and privilege take shape in everyday life.
We created digital files for every symbol, then hand-painted sheets of Tyvek before cutting each element using our Cricut machine. Line by line, we assembled the work—gluing, arranging, and sewing each module into place.
A Call to Look Again
The result is the Social Sonnet—a layered visual poem built through rhythm and repetition. Each symbol, from punctuation to pictogram, carries multiple meanings that shift through context and proximity.
The work invites viewers to look again—to question the systems that structure our world.
Within the Social Sonnet, we explore tensions between belonging and exclusion, care and control, freedom and access, desire and debt. It becomes a space where dialogue unfolds—between lines, between us, and between viewers’ lived experiences and the histories they inhabit.
FACEBOOK RESIDENCY:
In the fall of 2012, we found ourselves at the forefront of something new—among the first wave of artists invited to participate in Facebook’s Artists-in-Residence (AIR) Program, hosted by the Analog Research Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. It was an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the evolving language of interconnectivity, exploring the visual history of communication and the many ways we send, receive, share, and record information.
Our workspace was a stairwell alcove in Building 14 that became our makeshift studio and exhibition space—an open incubator where, each day, we generated a steady stream of original work. One-of-a-kind collages, prints, posters, buttons, site-specific installations, and interactive interventions emerged through a process that was fluid, experimental, and deeply collaborative.
The largest commission we completed was The Combine, a fifteen-foot-by-five-foot collage constructed from 6,912 individual paper pieces. Inspired by the “hackers, makers, builders” culture we encountered on campus, we layered a dense mix of materials: paper ephemera, hand-stamped patterns, drawings, Letraset, silkscreen, letterpress, RISO and Xerox copies, typewritten text, and even stitched elements made with our beloved Bernina sewing machine. Every single piece was hand-punched and glued in place—a meticulous nod to the analog art of cut-and-paste.
At the heart of The Combine was the idea of connection. The structured grid became a playground for interplay, where forms, colors, patterns, and text mirrored, doubled, and repeated across the surface. Stripes and lines wove through the composition, evoking corridors and pathways, tunnels and bridges, wires and signals—a visual map of interconnected thought. Designed to reward close looking, the work invited viewers to discover new meanings with each glance, forging their own connections within the collage’s intricate network.
For us, the residency was not just about making art—it was about sparking conversations, bridging ideas, and immersing ourselves in a shared culture of innovation. In that stairwell alcove, amid paper scraps and ink-stained hands, we became part of a larger, ever-expanding dialogue—one that continues to unfold with every new set of eyes that encounters the work.
