The
Ekphrasis
Exhibit

About This Exhibition

Art that speaks.
Words that answer.

The Ekphrasis Exhibit opened January 30, 2010 and ran through March 27. Curated by Pamela Hart – writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art, Pushcart-nominated poet, MFA from Sarah Lawrence – the show paired visual works from the Lift Trucks collection with original writing by novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers. The New York Times reviewed it on February 14, 2010 under the headline “Quirky Marriage of Art and Text,” in a piece by critic Benjamin Genocchio.

The curatorial premise came from a question Jasper Johns kept returning to: “Do something. Take a dream or a flag or a color and do something to that.” Hart’s framework applied that logic to the act of reading – take a visual work and do something to it in language. Each writer was paired with a specific piece; their response was silk-screened onto a broadside by master printer Gary Lichtenstein and displayed on the gallery wall alongside the artwork. Text and image hung together, in conversation.

“This exchange between artists and writers is ancient. The Greeks started it all and named it ‘ekphrasis’ – a verbal representation of a visual work of art.”

Pamela Hart – Curator – Katonah Museum of Art

The documented pairings give a sense of the range: James Balestrieri wrote a prose poem responding to Rockwell Kent’s 1931 lithograph Winter. Ben Cheever responded to a Saul Steinberg watercolor. James P. Othmer wrote a fictional conversation between historical figures in response to Ottmar Horl‘s gnome sculptures. Writer Marilyn Johnson also participated. Approximately 35 pairings in total, each one a distinct negotiation between a writer’s sensibility and a specific work on the wall.

The show opened with a reading. A catalog was published. A video document was produced by Earthflight Productions. It was the most fully realized single program in Lift Trucks Art’s history to that point – and the one that brought national press to Route 22.

Artists in This Exhibition