Tributaries

Tributaries

Curated by Lisa Gill & Purvi Shah

exhibition catalog

Tributaries Visual artists respond to the poetry of NEW RIVERS PRESS authors Lisa Gill & Purvi Shah

April 6 - May 12, 2007 Albuquerque, New Mexico

Presented by New Rivers Press of Minnesota State University Moorhead in partnership with 516 ARTS with events at Outpost Performance Space & The University of New Mexico

516 Central Avenue SW Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102 t. 505-242-1445 www.516arts.org

Published by New Rivers Press Minnesota State University Moorhead 1104 7th Avenue South Moorhead, Minnesota 56563 t. 218-477-5870 www.newriverspress.com Š New Rivers Press, 2007 Design by Suzanne Sbarge COVER: Valerie Roybal, Seasoned Timber, mixed media Becky Holtzman, Bones of Our Mother, eching/aquatint New Rivers Press is made possible by the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and other contributing members.

Contents Introduction 4

Alan Davis

Author’s Statement

Lisa Gill

6

New Mexico Artists

8

Author’s Statement

Purvi Shah

12

New York Artists

14

Artists’ Biographies

18

Support 20

Introduction Alan Davis Senior Editor, New Rivers Press

A s Senior Editor of New Rivers Press (NRP), a nonprofit literary small

press founded in 1968 by C.W. “Bill” Truesdale that has published over 320 books and is now a part of Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM), I am pleased to introduce Tributaries, a tri-city art exchange sponsored by NRP and curated by NRP authors Lisa Gill and Purvi Shah. The exhibition features four New Mexico artists and four New York City artists responding to two books of extraordinary poems.

The first is Mortar & Pestle, Lisa Gill’s second book, a title in our New American Poetry Series. Her poems are “a response to a diagnosis of a serious disease, which she is battling courageously, clinically as well as through these superb lyrical meditations. In her case the disease is multiple sclerosis, but it could be almost any other because the sweep of the poetry is so broad. The language is clear, evocative.

Gill gets down to basics...The guide here is nature, getting to the herbs of healing, against the body’s dismantling. Brilliant imagery in a thoroughly brilliant book.” (Gene Frumkin) The second is Terrain Tracks, a winner of our annual Many Voices Project competition. In her first book, Purvi Shah’s poetry explores nature, family, travel, and her Indian heritage. She examines what it means to be a twenty-first-century American immigrant woman. The book’s structure in part replicates classical sixteen-beat North Indian dance music, celebrating Shah’s Indian roots. At the same time, she contemplates contemporary American life, bringing past and present together in a vibrant cross-cultural collection.

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The exhibition opened in Fargo-Moorhead in the fall of 2006 at the Spirit Room as part of our fourth annual literary festival, launching the circuit of collaboration between diverse written and visual artists. “Dakota is everywhere,� wrote visionary poet Tom McGrath, who taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead. We honor his progressive spirit by publishing work with a strong sense of place that speaks to our troubled times with satyagraha (the truthforce), empathy and aesthetic courage. It may be a truism to say that we are living in a world not of our own making; what we make of that world, however, has a great deal to do with art that transcends local boundaries and corporate agendas.

We would like to thank Lisa Gill for the idea for this project, Purvi Shah, and everyone at 516 ARTS for their help in producing the exhibition.

Finally, I would like to thank each of the artists who contributed their work to Tributaries. I hope that those who see their work in this catalog or at the exhibition will seek out more.

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Author’s Statement Lisa Gill Author of Mortar & Pestle

W hen New Rivers Press offered to publish my second book, the last

thing I expected to be asked was, “Do you want a gallery?” And yet that’s exactly what Al Davis said.

I was stunned. Although I have a long history of working with artists, what kind of mythical poetry publisher overtly supports interdisciplinary collaborations?

New Rivers Press, as it turns out. When I overcame my disbelief, the short and immediate (and ecstatic) answer was, “Yes.”

Gradually, the idea of a group show with artists directly responding to Mortar & Pestle began to germinate. And because the first gallery installation in the Spirit Room in Fargo, North Dakota was connected to the 2006 NRP Literary Festival, I decided to expand the show and invite Purvi Shah (the other poet being published by New Rivers Press) to participate. I believe that when writers are linked by a press, we benefit from exploring our print connection and I also thought she might enjoy the opportunity for an artistic collaboration.

Then came the invitations. Purvi invited New York artists and I invited New Mexico artists. Each time I queried an artist, I felt great trepidation, as if I were asking, “Are these poems capable of transcending the page and the limits of language?”

Soon four women whose work I profoundly respect wanted to participate. As the work began to emerge, I was, again, stunned.

Interpretations burgeoned into unfettered imagination and wild resonance. The art gave the poems a sense of completion, tactile objects where once had simply been images in my head.

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With eight artists responding to two books, Tributaries is an exhibition with heft and heart. I thought it natural to let the show travel and bring the show home, to my home in Albuquerque, and share this work with the community I come from.

Ultimately, I am simply grateful to the artists, to the Spirit Room and 516 ARTS, and to New Rivers Press for providing this beautiful opportunity.

BIOGRAPHY Lisa Gill, from Moriarty, New Mexico, recently won a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her first book Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist was published by La Alameda Press in 2002. Her second book, Mortar & Pestle, poems responding to the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, was published by New Rivers Press in 2006. In 1995, one of her short stories, Holding Zeno’s Suitcase in Kansas, Flowering, was selected by Tim O’Brien for first place in American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Authors, a New Rivers Press anthology, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has performed widely from the Taos Poetry Festival and Zerxfest to the Seattle Poetry Festival, the New Rivers Press Literary Festival and the Thomas McGrath Visiting Writers Series in Moorhead, Minnesota.

She frequently collaborates with musicians and artists and designed the concept behind Tributaries.

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Becky Holtzman

Seedbed

etching, aquatint, chine collé; 12 x 11 inches in response to Gill’s poem Jimsonweed

“Collaboration is a terrifically fun part of art-making: it invites me to step outside of my ideas about my work, and the success of the endeavor depends upon a sweet, creative vulnerability from all participating. Collaboration also helps me to see my work in a larger context, one that is about giving and receiving and community, and then letting go. The invitation to page through a poet’s words for my own use is an honor and a challenge; my goal is always to stretch and internalize the words and images that my mind snags on, turning them into fuel for my imagery. Responding to a poet’s work is akin to translating, where I try to catch some essence of their idea with my visual vocabulary...it’s not illustration so much as digestion.”

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Kris Mills

Gumweed

oil on found ceramic plate, 6 inches in response to Gill’s poem Grindelia aphanactus

“I’m a narrative ranter in three-dimensions (a.k.a. sculptor) and have worked collaboratively with Lisa Gill since 2001. While the process of collaborating has often been loose and chatty involving social and digestive lubricants such as beer and coffee and culminating in large and heavy by-products (steel, bronze, clay, and electronics), this new project, Mortar & Pestle, has altered our precedent. First, the work had to be two dimensional. Like Kaopectate to my smooth muscle, I felt stymied by this restriction to my regular modes. I resigned myself to low-relief tile, a mini-shadow of my urge for spacial takeover and effluvia. Then Lisa had a dream involving plates. It was decided.

Dreams are as significant as beer and coffee as collaborative aperitifs.

So while nearly two-dimensional, the altered plates allude to a heaping helping of nourishment in a figurative three-dimensional smorgasbord.”

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Valerie Roybal

Seasoned Timber

mixed media; 18 x 24 inches in response to Gill’s poem White Birch

“I approached working with Lisa Gill’s poetry by reading particularly inspiring poems or lines a number of times in order to develop some visual ideas. I then proceeded to sort through a vast collection of ephemeral materials and selected items that were torn, cut, and assembled into a number of mixed media pieces. I frequently returned to the poetry as I worked to edit, refine, interpret, and reinterpret.”

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Suzanne Sbarge

Everything Burgeoning

mixed media on panel, 16 x 16 inches in response to Gill’s poem Heather

“My paintings in response to Lisa Gill’s poems, titled Plain Speech and Everything Burgeoning, are part of a new series of work that takes a departure from my narrative style. They delve into the abstract visual qualities of text and deconstructed language merged with patterns in nature. In this series, there is a visceral connection between Lisa’s words and my images, with our shared layering of references to the plant world, the body and language. For me, Lisa Gill’s poems are like connective tissue between layers of imagery and memory, illuminating the present moment.”

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Author’s Statement Purvi Shah Author of Terrain Tracks

A s a writer my fabric is words. The act of writing is solitary, the

movement of what is in mind to the page. But what comes to mind is an interaction between the world outside, my observations, and a reservoir of experiences. When this brew comes to fruition as a poem, I crave dialogue, that response from a reader which enables conversation, further reflections, and genuine exchange.

My wishes became tangible through the following visual arts responses to Terrain Tracks. Not only do these incredible art works hone in on key themes and images in my poems, but they transform my poems to embodiments.

During the process of working with four talented South Asian artists from New York City, I felt humbled to have my work receive deliberate attention. Not only did I meet with the artists to discuss my work and their thoughts and questions on specific poems, but each artist had clearly pored through my manuscript with fine view. As a writer, I am honored my words were graced with such close reading.

I had not imagined my poems would have the power to spur such beautiful, wide-ranging, and evocative visual art. In these responses, I treasure how Fariba Alam interpellates her own family story into the narrative of women’s history and migration my poems sketch.

In his photographs from India, Srinivas Kuruganti translates charted losses of women into the loss of immigration – a translation that carves a parallel context of meaning to my lyrics. How my words are translatable to another experience, to other deeply-felt senses of loss, amazes.

Another remarkable discovery is how my work interacted with the styles and preoccupations of each artist. The mixed media format and 12

observational depiction in Nandini Chirimar’s pieces bring concreteness while adding a visual archive of symbols imbued with cultural and personal meanings. Similarly, Chitra Ganesh’s pieces extend her brave style, capturing a different slice of my own work – that of the tortured, raw, worried spaces.

Each of these visual artists helped make a world of my poems. The poems and images together create a space of intimacy and beckon multiple responses. While opening up meaning, the pieces mark what cannot be visualized: conversations clarified that some philosophical aspects of the poems did not feel re-presentable in a visual format.

Thus, the poems and art both converse and travel separate journeys.

My hope is that viewers of these pieces and readers of the poems will bring in their own reactions to generate a new layer of exchange – so that the chain of meaning lengthens and burrows deeper into each of our lives and expands the world around us.

BIOGRAPHY Born in Ahmadabad, India, Purvi Shah currently lives in New York City and serves as Executive Director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based anti-domestic violence organization. Her poems have appeared in a number of prominent journals including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Descant, Many Mountains Moving, and Weber Studies. She has also participated in the development of Asian American literature by acting as a poetry editor for the Asian Pacific American Journal for six years. During her undergraduate studies, she won the University of Michigan’s Virginia Voss Poetry Writing Award. She earned her Master of Arts degree in American Literature from Rutgers University. In her spare time, she learns Kathak, a North Indian classical dance form. Terrain Tracks is her first book.

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Fariba S. Alam

Aunty’s Beach Days Remembered

C-print on canvas; 40 x 55 inches in response to Shah’s poem Circulation

“Through my photography and video work, I explore narratives of Muslims and of women. I’m interested in the fracturing of the postcolonial body in visual media and in life. Here, I consider a familiar feminist and post-colonial thread—the body as the location of tension or abuse, either self-imposed or inherited or both. I am inspired by the idea of ‘third spaces,’ such as the ones that exist between abused and empowered, exotic and local, represented and underexposed.”

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Nandini Chirimar

Made in India, Immigrant Song #3

mixed media on Washi paper; 36 x 27 inches in response to Shah’s poem Made in India, Immigrant Song #3

“I am currently working in mixed media combining woodblock printing, collage and drawing. My work is an expression of my life experiences: cities I have lived in or visited and my own daily practical, emotional and visual life. I am interested in buildings, houses, objects, toys, colors, patterns, traditional and pop culture, thoughts, feelings and facts. I combine different media with realistic and abstract images to explore these in my work.�

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Chitra Ganesh

Laila

sumi ink and mixed media on denril paper; 14 x 19 inches in response to Shah’s poem A new garden, her hair supplanted

“In this process of collaboration, after reading and re-reading the manuscript several times, I used the imagery from Terrain Tracks which I found both most striking, and most immediately connected to my own visual iconography that I have developed in my drawings. It was an interesting and challenging process to work collaboratively. I look forward to seeing how the other collaborations have been realized as well.�

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Srinivas Kuruganti

Untitled #2

silver gelatin print; 13 x 19 inches in response to Shah’s poem I live in fear of remembering, Immigrant Song #2

“I took these photographs for Purvi on my last visit to India, while documenting the HIV crisis there as part of The Lives in Focus project.

I have a very personal engagement with the people and places I photograph, which I return to year after year. Although I left India as a teenager, through my work I constantly revisit the country where I spent my childhood. With each coming and going between New York and India, I relive something of that initial transition I made. The landscape of Mumbai as the plane arrives and departs is an emotionally charged image for me and one which Purvi’s poems indirectly brought to mind. They say, absence is a color, the deep brown of life which is always receding.”

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New Mexico Artists Responding to Lisa Gill’s Poems BECKY HOLTZMAN received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Indiana University, Bloomington (1996). Her long-time affinity for collaboration led to projects such as Cross-Pollination, a visual art/poetry exchange with Albuquerque poet Jennifer Frank, exhibited in 2004 at the Harwood Art Center. Holtzman’s work has appeared in several literary contexts, including the journals Kalliope (2006) and Calyx (2007), and she contributed the cover illustration for Donald Levering’s chapbook The Kingdom of Ignorance. She recently co-edited the Harwood Anthology (Old School Books, 2006). Her work can be found in several private collections, as well as the State of New Mexico’s Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe. KRIS MILLS was born in Los Angeles and fled at a tender age to become the enemy of society and lover of culture. Shown internationally, wanted locally to teach art, Kris is a self-proclaimed “Jack of all trades” wanna-be, a “seldom do the same thing twice” thingy-maker, who thrives on pop psychology, dumpster diving and other forms of moderately anti-social behavior. Kris often works with human abnormalities and has an intrinsic faith that deviations from the norm matter in the big picture.

VALERIE ROYBAL has exhibited her work both locally and nationally.

Exhibitions include the Second National Book and Paper Arts Biennial and Paper Politics, An Exhibition of Politically and Socially Engaged Printmaking.

She has taught and/or coordinated numerous collaborative art and book making projects, including the Herland Anthology and the first Harwood Anthology. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Mexico and has studied Printmaking and Book Arts there for several years.

SUZANNE SBARGE has exhibited her work in over 60 group exhibitions and 12 solo shows since the late 1980s, and is in the collections of over 60 local, national and international collectors. Her work is represented at galleries across the United States, including Nuart Gallery in Santa Fe. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and Studio Arts from Barnard College in New York City (1987) and her Master’s Degree in Art Education from the University of New Mexico (1991). She has also studied studio arts at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Toulouse, France; Syracuse University in Florence, Italy; The Art Students’ League in New York City; Anderson Ranch in Colorado, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and Vermont Studio Center.

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New York Artists Responding to Purvi Shah’s Poems FARIBA S. ALAM is a photographer and video artist of Bangladeshi descent living and working in New York. Her work often explores the idea of “third spaces,” such as the ones that exist between abused and empowered, exotic and local, represented and underexposed. Alam’s photographs have been shown in galleries and festivals in New York City including a celebratory exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, The Queens Museum and the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, among others.

Alam was a Fulbright Fellow to Bangladesh in 1999. She holds a Master’s Degree from New York University and a Bachelor’s Degree from Columbia University.

NANDINI CHIRIMAR was born in 1967 and grew up in Jaipur, India.

She came to the United States in 1987 for further studies. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Painting from Cornell University (1990) and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1993). She lived and worked in New York City before going to Japan in 2000. She spent four years in Tokyo learning Japanese woodblock printing (Hanga), exhibiting her work and teaching art. She moved back to New York City in 2004, where she lives now with her husband and daughter.

CHITRA GANESH received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Brown University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University (2002). In 2003, she was a featured artist in Velvet Park magazine and chosen as one of OUT magazine’s top 100 people of the year.

Her drawings and installations have been exhibited in Toronto, Brazil, Italy, India, London, Gwangju, and New York, including the Queens Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Momenta Art, Bose Pacia Modern, Apex Art, and White Columns. Her work has been reviewed in Time Out New York, Art Asia Pacific Magazine, India Today, and The New York Times.

SRINIVAS KURUGANTI has spent months photographing the lives of families living in the Freedom Foundation AIDS shelter in Bangalore, India.

He has chronicled the lives of sex workers, coal miners and eunuchs in India. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Village Voice and in Refugees and AIDS, a brochure published in 2002 by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women & Children. His work has also been featured in several shows, including the Chobi Mela Festival 2004 in Dhaka, Bangladesh and at Time Magazine Gallery in New York. Having grown up in New Delhi and the United States, he is fluent in Hindi.

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www.516arts.org

516 ARTS is a nonprofit, museum-style gallery in Downtown Albuquerque, presenting collaborative programs with museums and organizations in the region and beyond. 516 ARTS is made possible in part by the generous support of: McCune Charitable Foundation City of Albuquerque New Mexico Department of Tourism Bank of Albuquerque BGK Group Charter Bank Coldwell Banker Real Estate First Community Bank First National Bank of Santa Fe Goodman Realty Group Grubb & Ellis Heritage Hotels & Resort John & Jamie Lewinger J.T. Michaelson Mosher Enterprises New Mexico Bank & Trust New Mexico Business Weekly Paradigm & Company SG Properties Stewart Title of Albuquerque Sunrise Bank Technology Ventures Corporation