POETS: Featuring A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Star Black, Joe Brainard, Mark Strand and Marjorie Welish

STUDY: A project by Adam Winner

It makes perfect sense that poets be drawn to the plastic arts; whether that attraction is critical, ekphrastic or practical, the act of creating a composition from the ether of words shares many formal concerns with making something new from the relative nothingness of color, line and light. It seems that the impulse of painters toward the poetic and poets toward the painterly are indelibly intertwined.

Co-curated with Alice Quinn of the Poetry Society of America, POETS is an exhibition of artwork in a range of materials by six pre-eminent American poets. A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Star Black, Joe Brainard, Mark Strand and Marjorie Welish have created works of art that elucidate the processes and approaches to their written output. With passion and vision, focus and fortitude, their visual voices are as singular as those written voices upon which their reputations rest.

Also on view is Adam Winner’s STUDY, an architectural re-creation of St. Jerome’s desk from Antonello da Messina’s 1475 painting depicting the saint at work translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin­. Long obsessed with the fanciful structure, Winner sets out to test the veracity of his vision and realize this fantastical workspace. With a paucity of means, he outfits a scrap-plywood atelier, the embodiment of his, Jerome’s, and all poets’ lonely, inspired devotion to craft. The library is sparely equipped with the ten-volume 1902 Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, a healthy supply of very sharp pencils and enough blank paper to last a lifetime.