Linking Lyrical to Visual

If every picture tells a story, what about every painting? A new exhibit at Rutgers-Camden's Stedman Gallery highlights how visual art can often be more readily understood, especially for newcomers, when seen through a literary context.

Titled, "Poetry & Prose: Chapter II," the exhibition features more than 40 works of art, including sculpture, painting, photography, and mixed media pieces, all of which visually embody one or more literary concepts. Critics and educators often use terminology traditionally associated with the literary arts to help explain what a work of visual art might be communicating. Artworks might exemplify narrative, such as Bruce Thayer's "Forced Labor," which calls on the artist's days working in a Detroit car factory; metaphor, as in Virginia Johnson's "Self Portrait," a pencil-sketching of herself with a menacing mouth for a face; and symbolism as in Sylvia Sue Buck's, "$kyscraper: 3" a three-paneled mono-print that can be "read" from left to right with an American tycoon looming tower-like from between his real estate.

Of course, depending on how one looks at each piece, and for how long, patrons may detect additional literary devices existing within the artworks.

Some visual artists, like Glenn Ligon, use actual words as a medium. In his "How It Feels to be Colored Me" the lyrical line becomes a visual line as Zora Neale Hurston's words "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" become transformed as they are reprinted continuously until the words become transformed completely into color.

Organized and owned by the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, the exhibit will be on display in the Stedman Gallery through Friday, Oct. 1. Chapter I of the exhibit was shown in the Stedman Gallery in 1993.

The Stedman Gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 4pm. The Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts is located on Rutgers University's Camden Campus on Third Street, between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

For more information, contact (856) 225-6350 or arts@camden.rutgers.edu. Visit RCCA online at rcca.camden.rutgers.edu. Admission is free.

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Author: Press Release