Poetry and the Visual Arts: The Case of Ricardo Pau-Llosa

One of the first, if not the first initiative I embarked on when I joined the staff of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame in 2003 was Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse. In fact, one of the privileges of working for the ILS, whose director, Gil Cárdenas, has been collecting Latino art---that is U.S.-based Latino art---since the late 60s, is that our offices, the walls of our offices are graced with artwork from Cárdenas' collection, which numbers in the thousands. When my office was based in South Bend, I managed to hang on my office walls, all four of them, the work of Carmen Lomas Garza. In short, I think my appreciation for Latino art has evolved significantly since working here.

Last year, I got to meet and spend time with Ricardo Pau-Llosa, the poet and art critic. The Snite Museum at Notre Dame recently inaugurated an exhibit featuring works from his collection. I wandered into in the exhibit today (I'm on campus this week) and was not, in the least, disappointed---not that was I expecting to be! Here's some exhibition copy, followed by a link to a PDF of the exhibit's catalogue, which is well worth a visual stroll:

Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art

O’Shaughnessy West Gallery

August 29–November 14, 2010
University of Notre Dame

The Snite Museum of Art is pleased to exhibit contemporary Latin American artworks from the collection of Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Cuban-American poet, critic, curator, professor and collector.

Since the mid-1970s, Pau-Llosa has used tropes to generate an original model of art criticism which maintains that Latin American modernist painting and sculpture is distinct from parallel currents in Europe and the United States precisely because of the high presence of metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche in its images. 

He was a senior editor of Art International from 1982 to 1994, North American editor for Southward Art, and a contributor and advisor to the encyclopedic Dictionary of Art, 1996.  A frequent lecturer at major art museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, his art criticism has appeared frequently in visual art periodicals and journals, and he has served as a juror and curator in various international biennials and group exhibitions.

Ricardo has also published six books of poems and has been published in American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Notre Dame Review, Partisan Review, Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and in many other literary magazines, and within numerous anthologies.

PDF of the Catalogue.


***

Click here to read the first issue of the ILS' new monthly electronic newsletter, New Horizons in Latino Studies. We hope you enjoy catching up on our news and learning about our upcoming lectures, opportunities, and events.