Over the past forty years he has explored the profound connections between visual art and creative writing in collaborations with artists such as Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Susan Rothenberg, Marisol, and Donald Sultan. In Company opens September 13 at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and will be on view through January 15, 2000.
Admission is free.
In Company includes a total of more than 200 prints, drawings, mixed media works, books, unbound text pages, photographs, and documentary materials from a variety of lenders including Stanford University, the University of Buffalo, and public and private collections. Soon after Creeley began writing and publishing poetry in the early 1950s, he started working with other artists and corresponding with the influential poet Charles Olson, who was teaching at Black Mountain College, and Jonathan Williams, publisher of Jargon Press. Early letters between Creeley and Williams on view in the exhibition document their ongoing friendship, as well as their mutual desire to circumvent the commercial publishing world. Both Williams and Creeley were interested in combining words and images in their publications and, as these letters demonstrate, both put painstaking effort into the way the books looked. In the late 1950s, when Creeley had relocated to the Southwest to teach and attend graduate school, he continued to publish with Jargon but also established his first connection with Charles Scribner's Sons, the highly respected commercial publisher in New York.