Ekphrasis - Poetry and Prose

Join us for a poetry and prose reading in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries! The readings of original ekphrasic poetry, by current MFA students and alumni, were inspired by artworks in our current special exhibition Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul, which is on view through April 6, 2023.

About the exhibition: Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul is a solo exhibition surveying the artist’s four-decade engagement with the physical and symbolic properties of thread. Minkowitz reinvents traditional needlework by crocheting fantastical forms, coating them in resin and shellac to create rigid sculptures and hangings. The delicate, mesh-like surfaces of her artworks break down oppositions between soft and hard, inside and outside, body and soul.

The poetic title Body to Soul is borrowed from just one of the sculptures that will be on view, but it is a broader theme that reverberates across the exhibition’s selection of over thirty vessels, sculptures, wall hangings, wearables, and works on paper – including never-before-seen examples coming from the artist’s studio.

Norma Minkowitz lives and works in Connecticut. Her work is represented in private and public collections across the United States and internationally. She is unique among fiber artists creating hard sculptures from soft materials, and for using thread to invoke universal themes of mortality, memory, nature, and writing. The exhibition is guest curated by Sarah Parrish PhD., Assistant Professor of Art History at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire.

https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/norma-minkowitz/

Image: Norma Minkowitz, She Who Wants the Rose, Must Respect the Thorn, 2014, fiber and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and browngrotta arts. © Norma Minkowitz