Date/Time
Date(s) - April 6, 2023
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Location
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, University Center for the Arts
Time, Memory, & the Use of Materials
Mark Irwin & Ron Kroutel: Poetry & Art in Conversation
Robert W. Hoffert Learning Center: Thursday, April 6 at 5 p.m.
Hear Ron Kroutel and Mark Irwin discuss time, memory, and the use of materials in art and writing! This special event features a conversation between the artist and poet, as well as a reading by Irwin from his newest book, Joyful Orphan: Poems (University of Nevada Press, 2023).
A book signing will follow, and copies of Irwin’s books of poetry will be available for purchase. Visitors can also order Joyful Orphan: Poems (2023) through the University of Nevada Press and Shimmer (2020) through Itasca Books Distribution & Fulfillment. For more information, please visit Irwin’s website at markirwinauthor.com/books, or click through to the Joyful Orphan flyer.
Join Gregory Allicar Museum of Art for this free event, held in the Robert W. Hoffert Learning Center and in conjunction with Ron Kroutel: The Glade Series. The Glade Series is a current exhibition of drawings and paintings that showcase the area around the proposed NISP (Northern Integrated Supply Project) Glade Reservoir near Fort Collins.
Free & open to all. Register on Eventbrite!
About Ron Kroutel
“Over my career as a painter I’ve alternated between the figure and the landscape of Southeast Ohio. Now I’m synthesizing the two periods by placing the figure in specific local landscapes. The landscape settings are based on actual contemporary places, times of day, and seasons, but the figures are acting out universal reactions to existence that all humans have always felt regardless of culture: cold, fear, frenzy, joy, anger, etc.
Since moving to Northern Colorado in 2016, I have tried to understand, through my art, the new western landscape and culture surrounding me, an environment so vastly different from Southeast Ohio. After working for a couple of years to embed the figure in this new landscape, I have now embarked on a series of pure landscape paintings and drawings where the landscape itself creates the narrative.
Rather than paint the remote, sublime grandeur of the high mountains, the close landscape around me along the Front Range of Northern Colorado has become my center of interest. Here water use is a major issue. The proposed NISP Glade Reservoir near Fort Collins is a project that offers me the subject matter to examine the ethical and practical issues involved, the connection between nature and culture The Glade Valley may be under 280 feet of water soon so my images are a form of pre-nostalgia.
The paintings of Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, a vast protected area near the Wyoming boarder, is essentially an ancient undeveloped landscape and thus becomes a poignant contrast to the threatened landscape of the Glade Valley.
The questions that the landscapes, figures and techniques bring up about our times are open-ended. I leave it up to to viewers to provide any more specific interpretations.”
—from Ron Kroutel’s website
About Mark Irwin
Mark Irwin is the author of eleven collections of poetry, which include Joyful Orphan (2023), Shimmer (2020), A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), Large White House Speaking (2013), Tall If (2008), Bright Hunger (2004), White City (2000), Quick, Now, Always (1996), and Against the Meanwhile: Three Elegies (1988). He has also translated Philippe Denis’ Notebook of Shadows, Nichita Stanescu’s Ask the Circle to Forgive You: Selected Poems, and Zanzibar: Selected Poems and Letters of Arthur Rimbaud (forthcoming with Alain Borer). His collection of essays, Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry, was published in 2017.
He has collaborated with a number of visual artists including Carroll Cassill, Jill Hadley Hooper, Ron Kroutel, Meredith Stricker, and Enrique Martínez Celaya. He is particularly interested in how artists protract images through space and time, and how various materials and objects are used to convey memory.
Irwin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many literary magazines including The American Poetry Review, Agni Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Conjunctions, Georgia Review, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Pleiades, Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, New American Writing, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Southern Review, and Tin House. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations.
He is a professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Salida, Colorado. His poetry has been translated into several languages.
—visit Mark Irwin’s website
Support for this event comes from DATA (Denver-area Art-alumni Transforming the Arts) for GAMA at CSU.
Support for Ron Kroutel: The Glade Series and related programming at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art has also been generously provided by Colorado Creative Industries.
