Fall 2009 Issue

Joe Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942, but shortly thereafter his family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up. From an early age Joe showed artistic talent. In the early Sixties, Brainard found inspiration in New York City where he met a plethora of talented artists and writers including: Joseph LeSueur, Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch, Alex Katz, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Rudy Burckhardt, and Yvonne Jacquette, soon followed by Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thompson, and others, as well as younger poets later associated with the St. Mark's Poetry Project, such as Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Tony Towle, Tom Clark, Larry Fagin, and Michael Brownstein, to name a few. His early paintings and assemblages showed the influence of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, but Joe's work soon distinguished itself by its lyricism, wit, warmth, and generosity, combined with his penchant for making art that was unabashedly beautiful. His 1975 show at Fischbach consisted of 1,500 miniature works. It was praised by New York Times art critic John Russell as "the wittiest show of the winter."

Brainard’s drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Museum, and the Joe Brainard Archive at the University of California, San Diego, as well as in many private and corporate collections. (More info at www.joebrainard.org)

Winter 2009/2010 Issue

Augusta Talbot was born in New York City, attended the Maryland Institute of Art from 1969-1971, and received a BFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1973. She has exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, and has twice had solo exhibitions at Vanderwoud Tannanbaum Gallery in New York City. Her work has been in numerous group shows, including The Sculpture Center in New York City, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and The San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The Village Voice, and American Ceramics, among other publications. Talbot is now involved in a collaboration with the painter Amy Trachtenberg on a large installation at The Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. She is also working on a project employing language and image with the poet Michael Palmer. Visit her website here.

Summer 2009 Issue

George Schneeman, a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, began painting in 1958 in Italy after graduate work at the University of Minnesota and service in the US Army. Nine years later, he moved to New York City with his wife Katie and engaged in the burgeoning scene around The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. There, Schneeman began collaborating with poets Ted Berrigan, Larry Fagin, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and others. It is for these spectacular and energetic works that he is best known. While some collaborations were conventional (e.g., accompanying illustrations for friends’ books), others went beyond categorization. Ron Padgett described the process in a recent New York Times article: “We would simply get together at his studio, using whatever materials were at hand. We would work spontaneously, sometimes on as many as five pieces at once, going back and forth between them, adding and subtracting and changing.” In 2004, Padgett edited Painter Among Poets: The Collaborative Art of George Schneeman, published by Granary Books. Schneeman’s solo work has been exhibited at the Fischbach Gallery and Holly Solomon Gallery, both in New York, and at the Denver Art Museum, CUE Art Foundation, and other public and private institutions.

Spring 2009 Issue

Fran Herndon met Jim Herndon in Paris in the late 1950s. They returned together to San Francisco where Fran met and became friends with the central poets and artists of the San Francisco Renaissance, including Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jess, and today with writers such as George Albon, Norma Cole, and Kevin Killian. At Spicer's insistence, Fran began taking print-making and painting classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, thus beginning her ongoing life as an artist. Her prints appear alongside Spicer's poems in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. Her sports collages, originally printed in Everything as Expected, were reprinted with some of Spicer's poems in The Golem, published by Granary books. In addition, Herndon's artwork was on a SUNY Buffalo Special Collections Library Holiday broadside, and on the covers of books by Elizabeth Robinson and George Stanley.

Recently Herndon has been making paintings, drawings, and pastels; she has shown her work at Canessa Park Gallery in San Francisco, where she will have a retrospective show in September of this year.

Summer 2010 Issue

When Ramona Szczerba (a.k.a. Winona Cookie) is not being a psychologist in private practice in San Diego, she’s busy making art, something she has done for as long as she can remember. She enjoys creating whimsical children’s illustrations in watercolor, but also loves working with collage and assemblage. She favors the darkest faeries, legendary women, arcane subject matter and inventors who never were. She is currently obsessed with the steampunk genre and is trying to keep up with the torrent of characters who insist on being depicted and having their stories told. She has illustrated several coloring books and published two calendars; three of her pieces with their accompanying stories will appear in the upcoming anthology of steampunk short fiction, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. “Tesla” will also be included in the upcoming Steampunk Bible.

Spring 2010 Issue

Born in the Palestinian village of Reineh outside of Nazareth in 1959, Zahi Khamis (www.zahiart.com) emigrated to Europe and then to the United States in his early twenties. After earning his degree in Mathematics, and studying Literature and the Humanities extensively, Zahi eventually turned towards painting as his primary form of expression. Appearing in a number of solo and group exhibits, including shows at the United Nations, the U.S. Senate, The Palestine Center (Washington D.C) and the Carnegie Institute for Peace (Washington, D.C), Zahi’s work has been featured in numerous publications in the United States and abroad. Influenced by the modernism of Picasso and Matisse as well as the Mexican muralists, Zahi’s work is part of the long tradition of committed art. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his children and wife, author Kim Jensen. He teaches Arabic at Goucher College.

Summer 2011 Issue

Euf Lindeboom is a Dutch visual artist. She graduated from the Minerva Art Academy (1991, Groningen). She lives and works in The Hague (The Netherlands). You can see much more of her wonderful work at: www.euflindeboom.nl The painting used for the cover in this issue is titled "little cottage in the wood," 2009, oil on canvas, 27.6 x 19.7 inches.

Spring 2011 Issue

In addition to her portraits of poets and artists, Ann Mikolowski (1940-1999) did numerous magazine and book covers. Her work is represented in the Detroit Institute of Art as well as private and corporate collections around the country. She was co-publisher of The Alternative Press for over thirty years.

This portrait of writer Bei Dao, measuring 3 and 3/8" by 4 and 5/8" inches, is one of a series of miniature portraits of poets, which includes depictions of John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, and numerous others. Read John Yau's excellent discussion of these portraits here.

Gladys Swan is both a writer and a visual artist. She has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, and seven collections of short fiction. She was the first writer since the inception of the Vermont Studio Center to receive a fellowship for a residency in painting. Some of her paintings have been used as cover art for various literary magazines and books, including her most recent work, The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories, which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The painting is entitled "Steep Ascent," 30"h x 22"w, oil on paper. Learn more about Gladys Swan on here website HERE

Spring 2013 Issue

Jack Walsh is a man of mystery living in Minneapolis, MN . . . more to come! Meanwhile, get to know his work HERE.