ART AS POETRY-POETRY AS ART

ART AS POETRY: POETRY AS ART EXHIBITION TO OPEN
JANUARY 9, 2009 - 5:30-7:30 pm at OLD SCHOOL SQUARE
Original Works of Art Inspired by Poetry

Palm Beach Poetry Festival will present Art As Poetry: Poetry As Art, an exhibition of original art, in different media, by visual artists, Trisha Orr of Charlottesville, Virginia and Mimi Coon of Palm Beach, Florida. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Old School Square and opens January 9, 2009 in the Frances Bourque Library at Old School Square, and will run through January 2009. An informal opening reception will be held January 9th, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Miles Coon, Director and Founder of the Fifth Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, said “The title of the exhibition, Art of Poetry: Poetry of Art reflects the cross-pollination that happens between language and visual arts. We are delighted that our Fifth Anniversary Festival will include these beautiful works in many different media. I know they will enrich the festival experience for our workshop participants and audience members attending the readings and other events.”

Trisha Orr is primarily a painter of realist still lifes. Her poem-paintings take the poems of her husband, the poet Gregory Orr, as their subject, and are a departure for her. They were first generated in response to an invitation to collaborate with him for an exhibit titled "Love Letter Invitational"—a show in which visual artists were asked to work with writers and poets on the subject of “love.” Trisha Orr said, “I tried to find equivalents in color and space and light for the emotions that I experience when I read each of the poems I chose to paint.” Her challenge was to create visual responses to Orr’s poems in which the text of each poem was legible, but with the final result being a painting in its own right, not just a poster of the poem. More of Trisha Orr’s work can be seen at www.trishaorr.com.

Gregory Orr will teach an advanced poetry workshop at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, January 19-24, 2009 at Old School Square Cultural Arts Center, Delray Beach, Florida. He will also give a craft lecture, a poetry reading and will participate in Beloved and Influential Poems, a panel discussion with all of the festival’s featured poets. All of these events open to the public.

Mimi Coon said, “This body of multi-media work is titled ‘House as Metaphor.’ The archetypal house, drawn in childhood, symbol of home, safety, security and family; house as a vessel for memories, our lives within it as we are housed in our bodies; house as a poem, each stanza, a room I return to time and again. I revisit this image, capturing it in ceramic, glass, stone, and on paper in paint, pastel and graphite. This work is an extended metaphor housing our mortality in its structures.

The art exhibition will open on January 9, 2009 and runs through January, 2009. The paintings, prints, clay houses and fused-glass houses will be on display in the Bourque Library and Ocean Breeze Room of Old School Square.