Erika DeFreitas
DeFreitas has written a serial text to accompany the exhibition. The first four chapters interrogate passages of Stein’s play. They are: (1) Nuns, (2) Negros and Chinamen, (3) Objects in the House, and (4) Memory and Remembering. The fifth chapter records a conversation DeFreitas orchestrated with Gertrude Stein via a medium on February 6, 2016. Chapters 6 through 10 are written in the exhibition and act to record the changing arrangements. As Stein states in her lecture Plays, “knowledge as anyone can know is a thing to get by getting;” and here DeFreitas thinks and makes and does Stein as a way to co-learn her compositional strategies—the same way exhibition-making is a methodology through which to co-learn Stein’s play. Visitors to the exhibition were welcome to pick up any of these chapters and use the texts as alternative guides to the exhibition.