Meg Day: Elegy in Translation
Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry
February 24 through April 19, 2026
Reception: Friday, February 27, 6 to 9 pm
Visiting Artist Program Lecture by B.A. Van Sise: Friday, March 27, 4 to 5:30 pm, McEwen Hall 209
Poetry Ready by Joy Harjo: Thursday, April 2, 5 to 6:30 pm, Rosch Recital Hall in Mason Hall. A reception in the Marion Art Gallery follows.
Beginning in 2015, New York-based B.A. Van Sise embarked on an expansive and inventive poetry portraiture project. With a lifelong love of poetry and a family lineage tracing back to the seminal American poet Walt Whitman, he envisioned a celebration of poetry that would reflect the diversity and vitality of today’s American poetry scene. Each portrait is a creative endeavor in which the poet becomes an engaged actor, rather than a passive subject, by posing in a situation based on one of the author’s poems. The resulting portraits are at once a likeness of the poet, an interpretation of the poem, and a presentation of a visual narrative invented by the photographer.
The exhibition showcases the breadth of contemporary American poetry, and includes Pulitzer Prize winners, Poet Laureates, and Chancellors of the Academy of American Poetry, as well as poets early in their careers. Literary revolutionaries like Nikki Giovanni, X.J. Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Patricia Smith are featured, as well as past U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Ted Kooser, Ada Limón and Robert Pinsky, and current U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. Among the early career artists are Meg Day, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Joseph O. Legaspi, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Nicole Sealey, Danez Smith, and Javier Zamora. The exhibition includes 50 black & white and color photographs and one video made from 7,000 photographs.
Children of Grass is toured by Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, California. The exhibition is supported at the Marion Art Gallery by the Carnahan Jackson Humanities Fund and Cathy & Jesse Marion Art Gallery Endowment Fund of the Fredonia College Foundation, as well as Friends of Rockefeller Arts Center. Joy Harjo's program is organized by the English Department and supported by the Williams Visiting Professorship Endowment and Mary Louise White Endowment of the Fredonia College Foundation.
Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry
February 24 through April 19, 2026
Reception: Friday, February 27, 6 to 9 pm
B.A. Van Sise's Children of Grass is an anthology of photographic collaborations paying tribute to American poetry today. Displayed alongside 51 portraits of celebrated and upcoming poets are the poems that inspired these pairings between Van Sise and the authors themselves.
