This exhibition features work by fifteen artists. Words, slogans, messages, and text have been used by contemporary artists and incorporated into their work for the past several decades. Once considered radical, it is now quite prevalent. Some artists use words to enhance an image, others use words as a means of explication, while others make words the image itself. Included in the show are works by both established and emerging artists: Conrad Atkinson, Paul Chan, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Judy Gelles, Jenny Holzer, Robert Indiana, Stephanie Brody Lederman, Glenn Ligon, Ed Ruscha, Jonathan Santlofer, Dread Scott, Amy Sillman & Jef Scharf, and Peter Sis.

The exhibit includes paintings, prints, and collage. The use of text in all of the works draws from a variety of cultural forms: sources include signs, comics and cartoons, diary entries, and political banners. Text is simultaneously and alternately informational and visual, rhetorical and symbolic. The use of text sometimes challenges the viewer to consider the place of the image, in turn, as a source of information.