Sitting Between the Sea and the Buildings: A Symposium of Poets and Artists Featuring Terry Adkins

The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and special guests convene for a symposium on various ways artists and poets develop their work through collaboration. Taking Joan Mitchell's legacy of collaboration with poets as a starting point, the day will include talks, readings, demonstrations, and performances that explore intersections of visual art and poetry.

Participants include poets Bill Berkson, Douglas Kearney, and John Yau; visual artists Terry Adkins, Lesley Dill, and Mildred Howard; and April Sheridan and Stephen Woodall of the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. The afternoon will conclude with the announcement of a commissioned performance piece, to be created collaboratively by Adkins and Kearney. The goal of the commission is to examine and experience how collaboration can change the way artists and poets think and work.

Sitting Between the Sea and the Buildings, named after the first line of John Ashbery's "The Painter," is organized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Poetry magazine in connection with the exhibition currently on view at the Poetry Foundation: Joan Mitchell: At Home in Poetry. The exhibition features a large-scale quadriptych painting, Minnesota (1980), as well as photographs, correspondence, print portfolios, and artists' books Joan Mitchell created in collaboration with poets. It will be open through May 31.

Sitting Between the Sea and the Buildings: A Symposium of Poets and Artists will be held Saturday, May 11, 2013, from 12:00 PM-6:00 PM.
 
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Chicago, Illinois
  
For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.