Artist + Poet: George Nama & Charles Simic Exhibition

ARTIST + POET: George Nama & Charles Simic

February 10 – April 10, 2010

The works of artist George Nama and poet Charles Simic are the subject of an exhibition at the Boston Athenæum’s Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery. The exhibition features a selection of Nama’s recent etchings, sculptures, and gouaches that have been inspired by and give visual illumination to Simic’s poetry.

George Nama is a New York artist who specializes in expressive abstracted figures, rendered in a variety of media, that interpret the works of major writers such as Simic, Yves Bonnefoy, and Alfred Brendel. His first one-artist exhibition was held at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 1963; since that time he has had shows at Shepherd & Derom Galleries in New York, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles, and in galleries in Brussels, Munich, Vevey, and Paris, among others. His works are in major institutions both in this country and abroad, including the Boston Athenæum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and Yale University Art Gallery. Nama’s versatility and generosity have made him the perfect mentor to and teacher of new generations of artists: for many years, he was on the faculty of the School of the National Academy of Design in New York. He lives near Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He has been honored with a Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 1967 he has published numerous collections of poems, the latest of which, That Little Something, was released in the spring of 2008. A collection entitled Sixty Poems was published in honor of his appointment as United States Poet Laureate. He has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano (2006), and has translated the works of Yugoslavian poets such as Ivan Lalic, Vasko Popa, Tomasz Salamun and Aleksandar Ristovic. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

This exhibition is organized by the Boston Athenæum and curated by David B. Dearinger, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings and Sculpture. A full-color brochure about the exhibition and its contents is available at the Athenæum.

A Note on the Exhibition

This exhibition includes the complete contents of two of the portfolios that have resulted from the collaboration between George Nama and Charles Simic, Wonders of the Invisible World (2005) and Eternities (2009). Both include an illustrated title page, ten poems with images, and a colophon. They were published by Monument Press, Montauk, New York, with sheets measuring 20 x 26 inches each They were printed on Arches Velin paper with text set in Linotype and foundry Garamond, by Darrell Hyder, The Sun Hill Press, North Brookfield, Massachusetts, with bindings by Jim DiMarcantoinio, Hope Bindery, Providence, Rhode Island.

Wonders of the Invisible World, published in an edition of thirty-two sets, includes Simic’s title poem plus “Description of a Lost Thing,” “Starlings in A Tree at Dusk,” “Calamity Crier,” “Insomnia’s Cricket,” “My Noiseless Entourage,” “Shading Exercise,” “The Vices of the Evening,” “Hanging Bridge,” and “The World Runs on Futility.” Eternities, published in an edition of forty-two, includes ten numbered verses with accompanying etchings.

The exhibition also includes four poems by Simic from Nama’s portfolio titled Poems (2005) –“The Loons,” “Prowling Memories,” “The Bather,” and “Evening Birds”— and four others: “Aunt Dinah Sailed to China,” “Crickets,” “Eternity’s Orphans,” and “One Wing of the Museum.”

The exhibition also includes a number of small and medium-size gouaches and two small sculptures, most of which were preparatory to the images in the portfolios. These were all lent to the exhibition by George Nama and have been joined by three works generously provided from her collection by Christine Romero. Finally, two artists’ books of recent date, are here. They are titled, respectively, The Spoon and The Fork (gouache and ink on paper, 10¼ x 36 inches each) and are the most recent collaborations between Nama and Simic. The Spoon is in the collection of the Boston Athenæum; The Fork is from the collection of the artist. The third part of this planned trilogy, The Knife, is in production.