Summer Programs Appeal to a Variety of Interests

Summer scheduling by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs is well under way. Music fans will welcome the latest information on the wildly popular free concerts offered as part of the Summer Jazz Institute, while lovers of literature are sure to find the season’s schedule of special events in connection with the New York State Summer Writers Institute to be most appealing. All events are free and open to the public.

Writers Institute Art Exhibit

Something new on this summer’s calendar is an exhibition of digital prints by area artist Michael Dolen in conjunction with the New York State Summer Writers Institute. The exhibition will run for the duration of the summer institute, through July 26 in the Payne Presentation Room of the Tang Museum.

The prints, each one 48 by 36 inches, are built around poems by a dozen poets who have been closely associated with the institute, as teachers and as visiting writers. The poems appear inside the prints themselves, with each print creating a vivid interaction between image and text.

Among the poets involved in the exhibition are former U.S. Poet Laureates Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass; English Patient author Michael Ondaatje, Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Howard, Carl Dennis, C.K. Williams and Louise Gluck; and other prominent poets who teach at the institute, including Frank Bidart, Carolyn Forche, and Lucie Brock-Broido.

Writers institute Director Robert Boyers writes in his brochure essay that the Dolen prints demonstrate “some of the unexpected uses to which the relatively new print medium may be put, so that it is not at all misleading to speak of the works in the exhibition as both ‘prints’ and ‘paintings.’”

“Of course,” Dolen has said of his works, “I was working with two computer programs, Photoshop and QuarkXpress, and so there was no question that I was making prints. But I wanted to make prints that look like paintings, and that have many of the sensuous qualities of oil paintings, including texture and depth. Equally important, I wanted to create for each poem a visual image that would complement the text and inspire the viewer of these prints to stand in front of them and take in not only the image but the poem.”

A number of writers institute public events will be held in the Payne Presentation Room of the Tang in July, so that audiences will sit surrounded by the Dolen prints. The first of these events is the opening night poetry reading by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner Richard Howard, at 8 p.m. Monday, July 1. Both the poet and the artist will be present at the reception immediately following the event at the Spa in Case College Center. The public is welcome.

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