INFORMATION FOR
The connections between painting and poetry will be explored during a series of three lectures to be held in the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University in Wayne during March.
Archie Rand, one of America’s foremost painters, will give the first talk on Thursday, March 3 at 2 p.m. Clark Coolidge, a poet and jazz musician, will speak on Thursday, March 10, also at 2 p.m. Native American artist Kay Walkingstick rounds out the series on Tuesday, March 22, at 2 p.m. All the programs are free and open to the public.
Rand, the Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, has had more than 80 solo and 200 group exhibitions and is represented in both national and international collections. He first drew national attention for “The Letter Paintings,” or “Jazz Paintings,” a controversial series he created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which incorporates the names of male and female African-American musicians on wall-sized canvases. Rand has published many collaborative works with poets, most notably John Ashbery and Robert Creeley, and has used scriptural and liturgical elements as armatures for countless paintings. He also often writes for international art journals. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Coolidge has published more than 40 books of poetry, most recently The Act of Providence. He has drawn inspiration from jazz, geology and painting, is the editor of a collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston, one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Other works include At Egypt, Space, Polaroid, Quartz Hearts, Mine: The One that Enters the Stories, The Crystal Text, and Odes of Roba.
Walkingstick is known in particular for her mixed-media diptychs that juxtapose symbolic, abstract landscapes with representational landscapes. “The idea of two parts working together in a dialogue has also remained interesting to me,” she says of her work, which has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and are held in numerous private and museum collections. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joni Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting and has been honored by the Women’s Caucus for Art and the National Association of Women Artists.
Speakers will be introduced by David Shapiro, a poet and William Paterson professor of art. The author of more than a dozen books of poetry, Shapiro also wrote the first monograph on John Ashbery, and books on Jim Dine’s paintings, Piet Mondrian’s flower studies, and Jasper Johns’ drawings. He has translated Rafael Alberti’s poems on Pablo Picasso, and the writings of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Shapiro won National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and was nominated for a National Book Award.
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a State partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Ben Shahn Galleries are wheelchair-accessible. For additional information, please call the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University, 973-720-2654.
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