Pages for al-Mutanabbi Street
Zea Morvitz, USA
| Pages for al-Mutanabbi
Street; Zea Morvitz, Inverness, California,
USA, March 2013 Visual art and poetry by 17 artists and 5 writers. When Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, California exhibited 35 books and 35 broadsides from the Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street, February 8 - March 10, 2013, I invited (at Beau's suggestion) gallery visitors, local artists and poets to create a single page each to be included in a compendium of responses. This book is the result. Some artists contributed pages that are completely abstract, some wrote poems into their artwork, one artist found a poem by Czeslaw Milosz to include with her art. We held a poetry reading and 3 of the local poets contributed a poem each along with an audience member who wrote: "When I learned of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, I wept." I was given some unique pages which I distributed among the 3 editions and made printed facsimiles as close to the originals as possible so the 3 books would have the same contents, though they cannot be exactly identical. The entire community around Gallery Route One and nearby Sometimes Books (a gallery for artist books and book objects) was deeply moved by the Al-Mutanabbi Street Project and I was thanked many times for bringing the exhibition to our rural location North of San Francisco. The general response, by all of us, is best expressed in the title of Albert Flynn DeSilver's poem, "To the people of al-Mutanabbi Street, in solidarity, grief and hope." 2013, 25 pp.; edition of 3 plus one facsimile. 8.75 h x 10.5 w x 1.25 d inches; mixed media on paper, handbound. zeamo@pandion.us |