This collaborative project employs visual art and poetry erasures to respond to missing person ads placed in Western Story Magazine, a vintage western pulp magazine that, “as a service to our readers,” included the “Missing Department” as a regular column during its print run from 1919 – 1949. In each issue of Western Stories that featured the “Missing Department,” cliched tales of cowboys, gunslingers, ranchers, and bandits give way to poignant and humanized expressions of longing, forgiveness, connection, and redemption, with each small group of sentences alluding to narratives of loss and hope, of runaway and abandoned children, vanished spouses and separated lovers, of relationships pulled apart by jealousy, trauma, two world wars, and even whim. Artist Ligia Bouton and writer Matt Donovan have each created a unique work as a response to selected Missing Department ads. While Bouton creates drawings, paintings, and collages on the original paper of the magazine’s issue as a means of exploring the ad’s content, Donovan responds by creating a poem from an enacted erasure of one the magazine’s pulp western stories. In this way, the collaborative artist and writer team create – through elaborate interventions with both the magazine’s pages and the language of its fiction – complex diptychs that interrogate human desire and loss.

Exhibition Venues and Events:

A.P.E. Gallery, Northampton, MA - November 10 - December 10, 2022
Artists Reception:  Friday, November 11: 5-8 pm (Arts Night Out)
Student Poetry Reading: Friday, December 9: 7:30-9pm

Tower Gallery, SUNY Brockport, NY - September 14 - October 8, 2023 Artist Recption: September 14, 4 - 6pm