Stories and art are coming together this week. I’ve been walking through the Norman Rockwell Museum this past week, looking through their illustration collection and imagining possibilities … What can happen when artists and writers come together, create new work inspired by each other?
We’ve seen this kind of play in other ways, dancers in museums, a poet and a composer creating an opera … but I’m a writer, and we’re standing on the edge of National Poetry Month, and so I wonder. If writers and artists had room enough and time, like Ishar Patkin and Agha Shahid Ali, or Trinh Mai and Shann Ray, imagine who could come together …
Even if I think of artists and writers with connections here, the possibilities have magic in them. Gloria Calderon Saenz, who once showed me waterfalls, would you want to fall into Guadalís Del Carmen’s Border of Lights, as Cindy De La Cruz brought her words to life on a summer night … or Emily Dickinson’s poems?
Brian Pinkney, would you think of sitting down with W.E.B. DuBois, maybe with his Afrofuturist fiction … or Meclina Priestly, shaping images out of words — I remember your micrography from the James Weldon Johnson group show at Simon’s Rock six years ago, and thinking of you, I’m remembering the morning Safiya Sinclair talked with me about her own words.
Or any artist immersed in any writer whose voice calls to them, and any writer drawing a story out of an image — what dreams can we imagine?
I’m wishing now that Jerry Pinkney could have painted in his vivid watercolors the people and the gardens in Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitudes, the way I heard Ross Gay reading his own poems aloud on a spring night.
Moments of Spring brightness
Mokoomba, an explosively talented six-man crew from the Victoria Fall, has been hailed as one of the most exciting bands from Africa in the 21st century.
Mokoomba, above, will perform African music at Williams College on Friday, as the college’s museum of art offers some color, and spring ephemerals begin to emerge.
More events coming up …
