Jim Dine (b. 1935) after the poetry reading conversing with New York poet Vincent Katz far left. Visual artist, Jim Dine has always had an affinity for poets and poetry. The following is from an artnet interview with Dine by New York poet, Ilka Scobie. Dine says, “You know I was a bad boy in school primarily because I couldn’t read well, because I’m dyslexic. And the only thing I could read was poetry till I was 22 and I started to read novels. But you know, poetry kept me in the world of language.”
An exterior view of a “roomful of words”—photo taken from the entryway to the Poetry Foundation. The Foundation building is brilliantly designed by architect John Ronan of Chicago. Photography by versluis
Alexander Girard (American, 1907-1993)
Alphabet, 1952
Wallpaper pattern
Printed paper
Herman Miller, Inc.
Zeeland, Michigan
Collection of the Vitra Design Museum
The fabric piece (wall hanging) partially shown above Girard’s letter patterns is titled “Letters” was designed in 1955 by Gunnar Aagaard Andersen (Danish 1919-1982).
Listen! Listen! An inside spread.
A children’s book by Ann Rand and illustrated by Paul Rand
Copyright ©1970 Harcourt, Brace & World Book. Photograph of the spread is from the book collection of Dordt College Library’s Learning Resource Center.
William Le Baron Jenney, Principal Architect
First Congregational Church, 1892
Manistee, Michigan
A Michigan Historic Site, copy taken for the commemorative plaque presented outside the building.
William Le Baron Jenney, eminent Chicago architect known as the “father of the skyscraper,” designed this beautiful Romanesque church. Completed in 1892, it features vibrant stained glass windows, two of which are of Tiffany design. The soaring rafters form a canopy over the curved hand-carved pews in the luminescent and graceful interior. Lumber, salt, and shipping industrialists of the late nineteenth century attended and supported this distinctive house of worship.
©David M. Versluis
These Photos Now: About to Break Apart
Montage, Archival Pigment Print
2015
18"W x 27"H
The University of South Dakota Art Galleries is currently showing, New Union / Re Union, in Gallery 110, located in the Warren M. Lee Center for Fine Arts. This exhibition features 50 artists, “who know Vermillion and/or the area intimately well,” interpreting lines from the poetry of Cynthia Nibbelink Worley, Harlem, NYC. The exhibition runs to February 15, 2016.
Versluis’s Artist Statement
Invited artists were asked to develop an image based on a single line in the poem by Nibbelink Worley a Dordt College alumna, class of 1966. I was assigned the line “About to Break Apart” from the poem titled, “These Photos Now.” The house façade, in the montage, is a photograph I took of the ca. 1900 farm homestead in Heritage Village in Sioux Center, Iowa.
These Photos Now ©Cynthia Hibbelink Worley
Looking at the photos now
They tell a different story-
The small frame house stands cold, alone
Its sagging porch, two elms I thought of once
as wondrous arms
seem weak- wasted limbs
about to break apart
My father's work shed too, lonely- a patch
of winter's snow
frozen on the roof
The barn, fat and warm inside I'm sure-
In these old sepia tones Phil sent upon Aunt Effie's death, I
feel the great sadness, emptiness—
everything simple, flat, so plain
Without these pictures I idealize-
Fresh bread baking in my mother's heavenly kitchen
The homemade Christmas tree glowing through a tiny window
Heat from a wood-burning stove-
The photos quiver with a certain reality
Wind howling through a hollow core
the heartache, precious pain
of that barren landscape
How hard we worked to make it seem more
than what it was
