“Eyechart” Dialogue and Reading
With Ellen Driscoll and Kathy Engel
Sunday, June 25 at 5 pm in The Leiber Collection Garden of Friends
Artist Ellen Driscoll and poet Kathy Engel, both teachers and activists, will discuss the process of their collaborative work and Engel will read poems from the project. Their exploration began January 2021, and over months of exchange and work, developed into “Eyechart,” an outdoor banner installation, a print exhibition, and a series of accordion books.
Acclaimed poet Yesenia Montilla writes of the larger “Eyechart” project:
In Eyechart, a collaboration — Ellen Driscoll's provocative drawings along with Kathy Engel's embodied poetics manifest a new language. In these landscapes the artist's hands are vessels for unique sight. Imagine "sleep's restless tunnel" as a winding road to an "imaginary we" or to something after, some place beyond translation, beyond time.
---- Yesenia Montilla, author or The Pink Box and Muse Found in a Colonized Body
Ellen Driscoll’s work encompasses sculpture, drawing, and public art installation. Recent public installations include "Site Woven" for the Charles R. Jonas federal courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, and “CartOURgraphy” for Middle College High School and the International High School in Queens. Ms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the Bunting Institute at Harvard University among many other honors.
“We entered into this collaboration with open spirits, encountering each other’s work anew in each conversation, over many months. The process was non-linear, and opened me to the surprises of many layers in Kathy’s work—to the periphery, the margin, to indirection. One to one correspondence of text and image or direct illustration was put aside in favor of surprise, and a welcoming of the unbidden. The commitment to this process kept us sustained and awakened to each other’s work throughout long months of the pandemic, and the ongoing daily violence unfolding in larger national and global events.”
- Ellen Driscoll on “Eyechart”
Kathy Engel is a poet, essayist & cultural worker. She’s spent her life working at the nexus between art, imagination & social justice. She teaches at NYU in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts. She’s co-founded numerous projects, organizations and campaigns, including the international women’s human rights group, MADRE, which she led for its first five years. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in journals. Her most recent book is ‘The Lost Brother Alphabet,” 2020, get fresh books.
“This collaboration, this journey of discovery has been the most marvelous calling to notice, to learn, to awaken, to deepen perception. Ellen’s brilliant art and love of literature, the keenness of her eye and mind, have helped me (thus my work) grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Collaboration, when it works, surprises, complicates, makes the world of one’s work bigger, more interesting, more layered.” –
Kathy Engel on “Eyechart”.
To reserve tickets visit www.leibercollection.org or https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ellen-driscoll-and-kathy-engel-present-eyechart-dialogue-and-reading-tickets-367446722037
www.ellendriscoll.net
www.kathyengelpoet.com
