Tim Youd Retypes the Hudson Valley

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Tim Youd’s performance continues from June 3-June 11 at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility decommissioned guard tower near prison gate in Ossining, New York. The performance contributes to the artist’s ongoing project 100 Novels in which he retypes the entire novels from beginning to end in locations that are charged with literary significance in the author’s biography.

In the guard tower of Sing Sing, he is now retyping Falconer by John Cheever. The prison was the model used by Cheever to write the novel.  This masterpiece is set in a state prison during the early 1970s. As Cheever biographer Blake Bailey notes: “Almost every set piece in Falconer—almost every detail—appears somewhere in Cheever’s journal entries about Sing Sing.”