Joy Harjo: Drowning Horses” (archival pigment print, 16 x 24 inches, © 2017 B.A. Van Sise) is among the featured works in the exhibition “Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry.”
Imagery of American poets and the poems that inspired the images comprise the next exhibition at Fredonia’s Marion Art Gallery.
The gallery presents “Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry,” an interdisciplinary exhibition featuring 50 photographic portraits and one video of prominent American poets by B.A. Van Sise, along with the poems that inspired the images from Feb. 24 through April 15.
The exhibition is free and open to the public. The art gallery is located on the main level of Rockefeller Arts Center on the Fredonia campus. A reception takes place on Friday, Feb. 27 from 6 to 9 p.m.
Other related activities include a Visiting Artist Program lecture with Van Sise on Friday, March 27, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in McEwen Hall Room 209, and a poetry reading by Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, on April 2, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Mason Hall’s Juliet J. Rosch Recital Hall. Harjo’s reading is part of the Department of English Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series and a reception follows in the Marion Art Gallery.
All activities are free and open to the public.
Van Sise, a New York-based photographer and author, embarked on an expansive and inventive poetry portraiture project in 2015. 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 is designed to showcase 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.
Featured in this exhibition are “literary revolutionaries” like Nikki Giovanni, X.J. Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Patricia Smith, as well as past U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove, Ms. 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.
A frequent contributor to the Village Voice and BuzzFeed, Van Sise is known as one of the world’s busiest travel photographers. His work as both a photographer and author has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Daily Mirror of London, and approximately 250 other publications. In addition, his works have been featured in exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Center for Creative Photography, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Van Sise is a graduate of the Eddie Adams Workshop and a National Press Photographer’s Association award winner. Several of his portraits from the “Children of Grass” project are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian.
The exhibition is supported by the Carnahan Jackson Humanities Fund and the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery Endowment, both established through the Fredonia College Foundation, as well as the Friends of Rockefeller Arts Center.
Harjo’s program is supported by the Williams Visiting Professorship Endowment and the Mary Louise White Endowment, also established through the Fredonia College Foundation.
“Children of Grass” is toured by Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, CA.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 4 p.m., Friday and Saturday from noon to 6 p.m., Sunday from noon to 4 p.m., and by appointment. For more information about the exhibition or to schedule a group tour, contact Gallery Director Barbara Räcker at (716) 673-4897 or email barbara.racker@fredonia.edu.
