While canoncial works of classic literature continue to grow more vital, relevant, and prophetic with each passing generation, creating fresh imagery inspired by such well-loved stories presents a significant challenge, even for the most ambitious artists. Take Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for example. A nonsensical children’s story sparked by an Oxford Professor’s infatuation with the Dean’s young daughter, the 1865 classic has inspired countless theater adaptations and Halloween costumes, bronze statues and Hatter tea cups, adaptogenic mushroom brands and even an orchestral epic by a Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer.
A new collection of Wonderland-inspired contemporary artworks approaches the abundance of Alice imagery permeating culture not as an obstacle but an opportunity, revitalizing the story’s original messaging in a way that is distinctly contemporary. Commissioned by Bond & Grace—a women-owned literary lifestyle brand where I serve as an Editor and Curator—the Alice Art Collection and its accompanying Alice In Wonderland Art Novel unite a curated selection of international artists and academics in conversation around what it means to experience joy, wonder, and the unknown in a world as surprising and unequal as ours is today.
Featured among the annotated pages of the Alice in Wonderland Art Novel and available individually through Bond & Grace’s online art platform, the works in the collection aim to “tease out Carroll’s formula for wonder,” writes Creative Director and Curator Maggie Lemak. In the wake of the U.S. election, the 70 paintings, photographs, collages, ceramics, and mixed-media works offer a timely reminder that madness is not a novelty but a test to face with resilience, curiosity, and hope.
Let us recall that soon after Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole, she experiences an acute crisis of identity, becoming utterly disoriented by talking animals and strange bodily transformations that remind her how oh-so-far-away she is from the security of home. Later, when she encounters the outlandish antics of the Mock Turtle and Gryphon, she even puts her “face in her hands, wondering if anything would ever happen in a natural way again.” Inspired by Alice’s growth, fear, and turbulent coming of age, 15 artists from Nairobi to Shanghai to Chicago explore pressing questions around visibility, normalcy, and power dynamics in our global culture at large.
In this diverse, storied, and introspective grouping of works, one will ultimately find—as Carroll puts it in his closing chapter—“the simple and loving heart” of a child who wakes up each day to see the world anew. After all, isn’t it a childlike curiosity and freedom that runs through the veins of an artist? From a collection that ranges from figurative abstraction to monochromatic hyperrealism, I’ve included highlights below that will inspire, provoke, and no doubt, compel you to lose yourself again in Lewis Carroll’s iconic stories.
Image courtesy of the artist and Bond & Grace.
“It’s a Zoo is a modern-day visual interpretation of Carroll’s literary caricaturization of society,” says the Italian-American artist Isabella Ronchetti. “A nod to U.S. politics and celebrity culture, it speaks to the absurdity of our rat race and the hypocrisy of the systems we have put in place.” Clad in streetwear, piercings, and tattoos, Isabella’s animals prance puckishly while the dodo bird in the foreground flaunts his date of extinction, cheekily depicted as a fist tattoo.
In this hand-cut paper collage, Michigan-based artist and Professor Emeritus Marianetta Porter imagines Alice as her young self, using daisies and black-eyed Susans to represent the character’s “transformation from innocence to autonomy.” Subverting viewers’ expectations of a fair-skinned child, Porter raises questions of privilege and access, reminding us that not all children in Alice’s time would have been granted the same freedom to wander and wonder.
The etymological shift of “gossip”—formerly a noun meaning a close friend or confidant—offers new intrigue when one considers the Victorian fascination with floriography, or the language of flowers. In A Gossip of Flowers, painter Morgan Jones Johnston spiffs off Carroll’s talking tiger-lilys, exploring the provocative symbolism of flowers during the patriarchal era. “Gifting flowers allowed Victorian women to convey secret messages their conservative society wouldn’t otherwise allow. This garden of chattering flowers feels revolutionary in that sense: it’s a gossip of flowers and ladies speaking freely.”
New Jersey-based painter and art educator Ariel Williams critiques the Queen’s abuse of power in her intricately detailed painting, The Adoration of the Cherry Tart. Inspired by the ornate style of Baroque art, Williams portrays subjugated cherubs struggling to uphold a tantalizing tart, parodying the Queen’s absurd desire to behead the Knave of Hearts over his alleged theft of a consumable treat. “The thorns that tear through the cherubs’ flesh symbolize the Queen’s hostile treatment of her subjects,” Williams explains.
Image courtesy of Bond & Grace.
“Curiousity, for me as an artist, is one of the most important things to nurture,” says the Sydney-based painter Deni Rayneau. Created without a fixed orientation, The Upside invites viewers to pave their own pathway of discovery—both in how they hang the work and in their personal creative journeys, however nascent or advanced they may be. Playful beige and boy blue strokes offset ominous maroon tones in the background, suggesting hidden messages that reveal themselves when one pauses to look beyond the surface.
Alice in Wonderland Art Novel is available through Bond & Grace.
©2024 Bond & Grace
Annie Lyall Slaughter is a Virginia-born writer and artist based in New York. Her art writing can be found in Cultured, Artsy, Whitehot, and various other publications. She can be reached on Instagram or through her website.
