Since 2001, Poets House has presented a series of exhibitions that honor the relationship between written and visual media, including paintings, drawings, prints, photography, book arts, sculpture, architectural models and archival manuscripts, correspondence and journals. The Exhibition Space is currently closed in advance of our move to Battery Park City. The future home of Poets House will feature a dedicated, state-of-the-art Exhibition Space that will showcase gems from our collection and innovative poetry-related works from around the world.

A Bestiary: Installations by Jane Greer and Brian Getnick
Opening Reception: Friday, March 24, 6-8pm
Exhibition on view March 24-May 6, 2006
Admission Free

Jane Greer's "Standing Up, Down" fills Poets House with cut-paper evocations of creatures great and small, while Brian Getnick presents "Curtains! Curtains!" a sculpture and video installation.

Jane Greer is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, NYU's Grey Art Gallery, the Ronald Feldman Gallery, Henoch Gallery, and various international venues.

Brian Getnick has participated in group shows in Rome, The Hague, and New York, and has recently had a solo show at the Lisa Boyle Gallery in Chicago.

Detail from "Standing Up, Down" by Jane Greer

"The Old Brutalists" by Brian Getnick

Sacred Burial Grounds:
Alphanumeric Painting by August Highland
Opening Reception: Friday, May 12, 6-8pm
On view May 12 through June 24, 2006
Admission Free

Like ancient civilizations slumbering beneath cities of glass and steel, classical poetries are buried deep in Highland’s visual texts on large canvases, which explore the modern experience
of language.

August Highland is an experimental writer and visual artist based in San Diego. Since he developed "Alphanumeric Painting" in 2002, he has shown it in over 25 shows, including four solo shows.

Detail from "Dante" by August Highland

Unlikely Angel: Dwight Ripley & the New York School
Curated by Douglas Crase
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 9, 2005, 6-8pm
Exhibition on view February 9-March 18, 2005
Admission Free

A rare glimpse into the archives of Dwight Ripley, little-known figure behind the pivotal Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Showplace for New York School painters, the gallery also published a series of chapbooks by many of those who later became known as the New York School of Poets. Among the items on display are John Ashbery’s first book, Turandot; a rare copy of Frank O'Hara's Oranges (original cover by Grace Hartigan); a painting by Helen Frankenthaler; and samples of Ripley’s own drawings.

Detail from "Merbomb in a Cage"
by Dwight Ripley, 1951

Purgatorio: Prints by Milton Glaser
Opening Reception: Friday, September 9, 2005, 6-8pm
Exhibition on view September 9-October 29, 2005
Admission Free

The first New York presentation of 20 exquisite monoprints illustrating scenes from Dante’s Purgatorio by the renowned artist Milton Glaser.

Milton Glaser is among the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States. He co-founded the revolutionary Pushpin Studios in 1954, founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968, and established Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974. He has had retrospective exhibitions at both the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art.

“Beatrice” from Dante's Purgatorio.
Image courtesy of Milton Glaser, Inc.

Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era
Exhibition on View November 4–December 10, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday, November 4, 5pm;
Panel Discussion & Reading: 6:30-8pm
with Kimberly Bird, Gene Frumkin, Estelle Gershgoren Novak, Naomi Replansky, Tom Viertel & Mel Weisburd
$7, Free for Members

An exhibition of archival material relating to The California Quarterly and Coastlines, the leading literary publications of 1950s Los Angeles, representing more than a decade of poetry and graphic arts in the city during the anti-Communist investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy in Hollywood. Poetry and prose by Allen Ginsberg, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, Charles Bukowski, Edwin Rolfe, Henry Coulette, Kenneth Rexroth, Thomas McGrath, Naomi Replansky, and Don Gordon will be included as well as a sampling of drawings and photographs. This show will present the work of an important, if often overlooked, community in Post-War American poetry.

Join us for a panel discussion, with three poets—Gene Frumkin, Estelle Gershgoren Novak, and Mel Weisburd—and scholar Kimberly Bird, as they address the relationship between politics and poetry, with a special focus on the role the two magazines played in Los Angeles during the McCarthy years. Naomi Replansky will join the panelists for a poetry reading to close the evening.

Kimberly Bird is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Gene Frumkin, co-founder and poetry editor from 1955 to 1958 of Coastlines, is the author of many collections of poetry, including The Rainbow Walker and The Mystic Writing Pad. Estelle Gershgoren Novak is the editor of Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era and the author of two collections of poetry. Naomi Replansky's first book, Ring Song, was nominated for the 1952 National Book Award in poetry; The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems appeared in 1994. Tom Viertel, an editor at Coastlines, is an oral historian of Los Angeles' émigré arts community of the 1940s, which included Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. Mel Weisburd was co-founder, editor in chief, and managing editor of Coastlines. His articles and poems have appeared in many publications.

“Walking, Poems & Buildings”
A Poetry & Architecture Collaboration
Curated by poet Annie Finch & architect Ben Jacks
Opening Reception: Friday, January 7, 2005, 6pm
On view through February 25, 2005

The exhibit “Walking, Poems & Buildings” features poems and architectural models of a bus shelter, a “writer’s hut” and a nature observation center created collaboratively by students of poet Annie Finch and architect Ben Jacks at Miami University. This show explores the ways in which architects and poets build and inhabit durable and harmonious forms, and how walking creates a rhythmic link between the two pursuits.

Ben Jacks teaches in the Department of Architecture and Interior Design at Miami University in Ohio. He is currently researching and writing about walking, landscape, and buildings. Poet, translator and librettist Annie Finch teaches in the creative writing program at Miami University. Her books of poetry include Calendars and Eve, as well as a translation of the Complete Poems of French Renaissance poet Louise Labé. She has also written or edited five books on poetics, including The Ghost of Meter and A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women.

A Poet’s Eye for Collage
Collages and Handmade Books by Star Black
Opening Reception: Friday, March 11, 2005, 6pm
On view through April 29, 2005

These works on paper bring together text and image in what Black describes as “visual pages,” which, like linguistic acts of creation, are “brief and bounded by space.”

Poet and photographer Star Black is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Ghostwood. Her photographs are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Her collages have been exhibited in various galleries in New York City and Long Island.

The Art of Reading
From the Donald & Patricia Oresman Collection
Opening Reception: Friday, October 8, 2004, 6pm
On view through November 22, 2004

Please join us for an exceptional exhibit of images culled from the Oresman collection. Rodney Phillips curates a selection of over thirty works of art, from Magritte to Brainard, Diebenkorn to Warhol, representing wildly different styles and mediums but collectively focused around the theme of people reading. “I think there is an intensity to reading that captures artists’ imaginations,” Donald Oresman says, “because it has a very private element to it.” We invite our readers to step into a public display of this private endeavor, to enter into an evocative dialogue with artists who share a love for the intimate act of reading.

Donald Oresman is of Counsel to Simpson Thacher and Bartlett in New York City. He has served as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Paramount Communications Inc. Poet Rodney Phillips is a celebrated curator and editor whose recent achievements include an exhibit of William Butler Yeats’ work at the New York Public Library, where he was Director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. He edited A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, among many others.

David Hockney. Yves-Marie de Paris
Graphite and colored pencil, 1974
17” x 13”

Rene Magritte. L’Eminence Grise
Photograph, 1938
3” x 2”

The New Millennium Chapbook
On view April 2–April 30, 2004

While occupying the margins of the literary world, the small press and the chapbook are often vehicles for defining historic poetry communities and shifts in poetics. This exhibit highlights new works published by contemporary small presses that continue this dynamic tradition while exploring the possibilities of the chapbook form.

Curated by Ryan Murphy, who is the author of On Violet Street, a chapbook of poems published by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. With Patrick Masterson, he operates A Rest Press.

Community-Word Project Mural Exhibit
On view February 7-28, 2004

Vibrant murals that feature the poetry and artwork of participants in the Community-Word Project.

Founded in 1997, The Community-Word Project is a New York City based arts-in-education organization that seeks to increase the literacy and leadership of at-risk public school children.

"Unlocking the door I see the blue large sky and I feel golden wings growing out of my back so I can fly."

—4th graders, P.S. 79, Bronx, NY
(photo credit: Alex Harsley)