Mira Schendel’s work is a visual manifestation of language, capturing voice, words, and gestures. Considered preeminent among late 20th-century Latin American artists, Schendel created delicate graphite drawings, monotypes, and watercolors of letters, words, and phrases that portray how we apprehend the world through sometimes obscure but often insistent language. Haiku-like and painterly with a keen attention to surface, Schendel’s work is less didactic and more visceral than work by her contemporaries, who investigated semiotics and post-structuralist theory in the 1980s.