Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have a quote on my desk by Saad, a Persian poet, that kept us going the whole year," Weiss said. "Have patience. All things are difficult before easy...
...flight of stairs to a dark, low-ceilinged room. Sitting on rickety wooden chairs, squeezed in along scarred red leather banquettes, they heard, over six nights, the sort of performers who have made the Vanguard the Mecca of Hip for the past half-century: jazz diva Shirley Horn, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, cafa swell Bobby Short, folk singer Pete Seeger and Professor Irwin Corey, the "World's Foremost Authority," who was once a comic mainstay of the club. Back in the '40s, when the Vanguard's founder, the late Max Gordon, asked the professor whether he thought the place would...
...subject. Edmonia Lewis, the first African-American woman to make her living as a sculptor, was the daughter of a Black father and a Chippewa Indian mother. Longfellow, though his reputation has been eclipsed by that of Walt Whitman in the past century, was the most famous living American poet of his time...
Lewis and Longfellow met only once, during one of the poet's visits to Rome, where Lewis spent most of her adult life. Her interest piqued by the meeting, Lewis made several busts of Longfellow, which serve as the central pieces of the exhibit. Despite her African and American heritage, Lewis chose to work in the distinctly European genre of neoclassical sculpture, a fact that the exhibit tries to play up. Similarly, a marginalized artist's interest in a patriarchal icon like Longfellow is intended to serve as a metaphor for the difficulty of communication between members of a society...
...Images and Identities" also includes some Longfellow-related pieces, including portraits of the poet by other artists, and some eerily fascinating Hiawatha kitsch. One of the stranger pieces is a ceramic plate depicting Hiawatha carrying off his new bride, Minnehaha, who, in a bit of artistic license-taking, has been made into a Nordic goddess. However, unless you have a real interest in the poet, most of the exhibits aren't very compelling. Some of the broader historical points the show makes are relevant but not very interesting...