Arts & Entertainment

Poets and Painters Complement, Combine at Downtown Columbia Art Exhibit

The exhibit, which runs through March 25, doesn't just put poems and paintings in the same room, but pairs them together. And in turn, viewers see them as one larger work.

The obvious, cliched route in starting off an article about a gallery exhibit featuring artwork and poetry alongside each other would be to begin with the familiar refrain of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The obvious, cliched route is not always the right route to take.

Artwork, on its own, has meaning. So, too, does writing. And when placed side by side, artwork and poetry not only can complement each other, but can combine to have new meaning.

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This is what one finds while scanning the "Poets and Painters" exhibit at the in downtown Columbia.

"It is a collaboration of the image and the word," said Diane Dunn, a member of the artists' cooperative who has two photographs and one painting in the show.

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"When I saw them hanging there with a poem next to them, it made me think about the work in a whole new way, things I wasn’t necessarily thinking about when I created them," Dunn said.

Some of the pairings at the exhibit are a product of the poets and artists getting together and seeing whether any of their writing or artwork there with something others had done. Others, meanwhile, found inspiration and created new works.

Linda Joy Burke wrote "Listening to One Black Bird" in response to Deborah Maklowski's color pencil piece, "Blackbird," according to Dunn. And Tara Hart saw Debbie Hoeper's painting, "The Plains," and decided to rework an old poem into "Plain of Gladness."

"The most exciting thing about a show like this is the synergistic effect of reading a poem alongside a piece of artwork," Dunn said.

"Whether the poem was written specifically for a painting, or whether the artist created a work in response to a poem, or whether poets and painters just found one another's work and decided to put them together for the show, it makes both poem and painting something more than when experienced alone."

Poets and Painters runs through March 25. The Artists' Gallery is located in the American City Building, 10227 Wincopin Circle, Columbia, and is open from Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and on Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.


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