The New York-based artist Emily Edelman works with text and typography, drawing on existing writing systems and inventing new ones at the boundary between legibility and abstraction.,She uses algorithms and physical materials to explore how communication persists across hand and machine, often building her generative systems from her own handwriting.,,
Edelman has spent more than a decade working as an experiential designer, and her generative art practice grows out of an earlier background in graphic design and typography.,That grounding shaped Twos (2021), an Art Blocks series built from a numeral '2' that Edelman drew and redrew for a year and a half before applying an algorithm to it. The series renders the character in pixelated, hand-drawn textures modeled on analog printmaking, treating code as a craft that stays close to the artist's hand.
In 2023, Agar drew on abstract expressionism, pixel art and the grid rules Edelman studied as a graphic designer, using only squares and circles across 100 outputs, each with its own color palette.It launched with a solo show and live minting at Bright Moments in New York.For “FEMGEN”'s second edition in Marfa, Texas in 2023, Edelman showed Cosmico, a series of 24 images built from her own handwriting and text describing the exact date, time and coordinates of the show's opening.Of her practice, Edelman has said: “Generative systems speak to the power of people to change the world by deliberately designing those systems.”
In 2025, Edelman contributed Carfax to “Cure³”, a Bonhams charity auction for Cure Parkinson's, stretching and layering her own handwriting until it dissolved from legible text into dense, expressive texture. One output from the series was plotted physically for the show's London presentation in February 2025.Edelman has also worked collaboratively, pairing with Tina Chang on The Beginning is Feminine: spark (2022), shown in theVERSEverse's “POÈME SBJKT” exhibition in Paris.In 2025, she wrote the introduction to Le Random's New York City Digital Art Guide.
