PARRISH AND STONY BROOK SOUTHAMPTON TO PRESENT POETRY “PERFORMANCES” IN MUSEUM GALLERIES

What do photo shoots, demagogues, the Poem-a-Tron®, song, video loops, conversation, mathematics, and a secret piano have in common? The Parrish Art Museum and Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literature have partnered to present a poetry “event” on Sunday, April 1, starting at 2 pm, to celebrate National Poetry Month. Five graduate students from the program have been invited to generate poetry, performances, activities, and “happenings” in response to the Museum’s current exhibition EST-3: Southern California in New York—Los Angeles Art from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection [several of which are featured here].

As part of the April 1 program, Museum-goers will get on-the-spot portraits taken by Phebe Szatmari, who will also write a flash poem commemorating the interaction. In Gallery Two, they’ll encounter Holly Weinberg’s “Demagogue” via videotape. (She’s in hiding from political foes, but that doesn’t mean she can’t still spew her pre-recorded poetic propaganda.) Gallery Three contains the Poem-a-Tron®, a human poem-generating “machine” that is the brainchild of Sarah Azzara. All that’s needed to activate it is a cell phone. Finally, in the concert hall, Matthew Miranda will be performing original piano pieces using musical theory to generate sound patterns.

Meanwhile, depending on where listeners position themselves inside the concert hall, they’ll find Ashleigh Smith’s multiplicity poems—hanging from the ceiling. This program is free with Museum admission.

The Stony Brook students will also create poems in response to sixteen different art works in the exhibition. These poems will be added to the Museum’s audio guide for the duration of the exhibition, which runs through June 17. Audio guides are free for Museum visitors.

Throughout April, the Parrish will use social media to promote poetry writing and reading, following the lead of the Academy of American Poets, which established American Poetry Month in 2006.

The Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.

*all photos by Gary Mamay

About the Parrish Art Museum

The Parrish Art Museum is located in Southampton. Founded in 1897, the Museum celebrates the artistic legacy of Long Island’s East End, one of America’s most vital creative centers. Since the mid-1950s the Museum has grown from a small village art gallery into an important art museum with a collection of more than 2,600 works of art from the nineteenth century to the present. It includes such contemporary painters and sculptors as John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Elizabeth Peyton, as well as such masters as Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. The Parrish houses important collections of works by the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase and the post-war American realist Fairfield Porter. A vital cultural resource serving a diverse audience, the Parrish organizes and presents changing exhibitions and offers a dynamic schedule of creative and engaging public programs including lectures, films, performances, concerts, and studio classes for all ages. On July 19, 2010, the Parrish broke ground on a new building designed by internationally acclaimed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The 34,500-square-foot facility will triple the Museum’s current exhibition space and allow for the simultaneous presentation of loan exhibitions and installations drawn from the permanent collection. The new building is expected to open in fall 2012.