NEW PALTZ — Irving Weiss, emeritus professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz, will have his book and manuscript/typescript, Visual Voices: The Poem as a Print Object, (Runaway Spoon, 1994) included in a soon-to-open exhibition, “The Next Word: Text and/as Design and/as Meaning,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art of the State University of New York at Purchase. The exhibit will run from September 20, 1998 through January 30, 1999; the opening will be held on September 26 from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
“The Next Word” is an interdisciplinary catalogues exhibit which explores new avenues that link imagery and language within an artistic context. The exhibition, which concentrates on the areas of visual art, artists’ books, visual and concrete poetry, graphic design, and new media, will include work by artists, poets, and a new generation of web- based designers.
Johanna Drucker, professor of art history at SUNY Purchase (and formerly at Yale University), is the exhibition curator. Drucker selected the Weiss manuscript/typescript and book for the exhibit from the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry of Miami Beach, Fla. The Sackner Archive, the largest such archive in the world, is lending some of its holdings to the exhibit.
Weiss, who taught English for 21 years, retired in 1985. He currently resides in Chestertown, Md.
Examples of visual poems in Visual Voices can be found at the Runaway Spoon link to the Prose and Contexts web site at : http://www.interlog.com/~dal/rasp
