Recent years have seen a proliferation of younger artists whose work employs typography, printed characters, or even the very institution of printing.

We have been accustomed to the predominance of language in art at least since the rise of Conceptual practices in the early 1970s, but the current turn represents something different: it takes up not language per se, but language's material realization and the particular histories carried within its forms.

In this year's Hilla Rebay Lecture, Tom McDonough, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Binghamton University, focuses on artists and collectives-such as Dexter Sinister, Shannon Ebner, Janice Kerbel, and Adam Pendleton-whose work demonstrates how typography has become a central element of aesthetic practice.