The exhibit POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004 opened to the public on Saturday December 11, 2004, and occupied the galleries at California Historical Society in downtown San Francisco’s museum district for 17 weeks, until April 16, 2005.  More than 100 original works --many never publicly exhibited-- by over 80 individuals were on display.  This first-of-its-kind exhibit represents a collaboration between the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, currently observing its 50th anniversary with poetry programs throughout the city, and the California Historical Society.  The exhibit offered a multi-faceted window onto the rich interactions that have taken place over the past half-century, centered around San Francisco’s celebrated poetry community.

The exhibit, curated by Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison, focused on:

~ art made by poets
~ poet-artist collaborations
~ works by artists in poets’ circles

The exhibit prominently featureed San Francisco poet and visual artist Norma Cole’s site-specific installation Collective Memory, a multimedia work situated in the foyer of the gallery, made in collaboration with the Poetry Center and sponsored by the Creative Work Fund.  Cole’s activities will involve the composition of a work of poetry within the space of the gallery, with subsequent publication as a fine-print artist’s edition by Granary Books of New York City.

A broad spectrum of individual artworks, beginning in the 1950s with original pieces by prominent poet-artists close to the Poetry Center from its early days, will lead up to a diverse array of contemporary artworks that carry on the Bay Area’s interactive poet-artist traditions. 

Exceptional earlier pieces exhibited in the show include: 

• Kenneth Rexroth’s distinctive, delicate work with pastels
• rarely shown collaborations and individual works by Robert Duncan and Jess
• Kenneth Patchen’s fantastical painted beasts
• Allen Ginsberg’s West Coast photos from 1955 during the time of  his poem Howl to 1984
• Saburo Hasegawa’s wildly exuberant calligraphic work based on Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching
• an original private press work by William Everson (Brother Antoninus), who undertook the printer’s trade while in a World War II Conscientious Objector camp in Waldport, Oregon
• paintings by poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima
• Mary Oppen’s torn-paper collage depicting her husband, poet George Oppen
• calligraphic works by friends and Reed College alumni Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, students of legendary calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds
• surreal balladeer Helen Adam’s otherworldly collage-work
• David Meltzer’s collages mining the iconography of Jewish Kabbalah
• Fran Herndon’s collages invoking pop-culture icons Willie Mays and Marilyn Monroe
• rare visual works by poets Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Madeline Gleason, and Barbara Guest
• major early paintings by Black Mountain College alumni Tom Field and Paul Alexander, regarded as signal works of the time
• the generation of assemblage artists that coalesced in the Bay Area during the 1950s will be represented with works by Wallace Berman, Jess, Bruce Conner, and George Herms

Among new pieces in the exhibit, highlights include recent poetry-related works by Bay Area painters Carlos Villa, Amy Trachtenberg, Gustavo Ramos Rivera, Arnold J Kemp, and Oliver Jackson.  The exhibit will not focus intensively on books, though several outstanding examples of area book-arts will appear on display.  Individual photo-portraits and historical shots by area photographers will accent the painted, drawn, handprinted, and constructed artworks.

“In many ways, this exhibit is a tribute to the poet-artist galleries that had short but significant lifespans in San Francisco of the 1950s and ’60s:  King Ubu Gallery, the Six Gallery, Batman Gallery, Borregard’s Museum, Buzz Gallery, and the North Beach coffeehouses and bars that did double duty as art-spaces. The San Francisco of this period served as a geographic confluence of radically realized individual and collective visions.  Poets and artists together as friends, lovers, rivals, and audience to one another’s practice, creatively imagined a city perched on the country’s far coast, and worked together to bring that city into being.”

--Steve Dickison, curator of the exhibit

POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004 is dedicated to extraordinary San Francisco artist Jess (1923-2004), companion of the late poet Robert Duncan, pioneer of California assemblage art, and great friend to the poets, and to San Francisco literary editor Donald M. Allen (1912-2004), whose 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, and subsequent work as editor and publisher, was instrumental in opening up audiences for an innovative counter-tradition of American poets, many of whom have works on display in the exhibit.   

The exhibit will also feature several additional public programs, details to be announced, to take place within the gallery space and at other San Francisco locations.

In conjunction with the exhibit, three special evenings of poetry-related film and video are scheduled to take place November 18, December 2, and December 12, under the series heading Moving Picture Poetics.  The series is curated by San Francisco cinema artist Konrad Steiner, and is a collaboration between the Poetry Center and San Francisco Cinematheque.  For program details, show times, and locations, contact San Francisco Cinematheque, www.sfcinematheque.org, 415-552-1990, or the Poetry Center’s website: www.sfsu.edu/~poetry. 

Gallery admission for POETRY and its ARTS is $3 for adults.  High school students, with identification, can be admitted free of charge, and docent tours designed for high-school age audiences can be arranged by contacting the Poetry Center, 415-338-2227, e-mail: poetry@sfsu.edu.  Galleries at California Historical Society, 678 Mission Street (4 doors east of 3d St.) are open to the public Wednesday thru Saturday, noon to 4:30 pm.

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