In his large-scale calligraphic drawing '100 and One Dead Poets' (2016), Armajani honors poets across geographies and generations. The artist created this 14-foot drawing by recording excerpts from poems by each of these figures, and then meticulously covering the inscriptions with correction fluid. He describes the resulting surface as a “retinal experience.” The drawing is an abstract composition of text embedded with small representational elements that function as vignettes; for example one notices a small rendering of a pear, a common motif in his earliest calligraphic work dating from the late 1950s while he was still living in his native Iran.
