Art of eye and ear in Pyro's 'Double Vision'

• "I thought a project with writers could broaden Pyro Gallery's audience%2C" Jeff Skinner said.
• "Poets and artists work in a solitary way ... we are visual and they are auditory%2C" Kay Grubola said.
• One lesson%3A "It's silly to prejudge people or a situation%2C" said poet Makalani Bandele.

"People were really enthusiastic about doing it, but when it came time to start the work, this project was a lot scarier," said artist Kay Grubola about working with an assigned poet to produce one of 16 works in the Pyro Gallery's new exhibit, "Double Vision."

Other artists had other words to describe their fears. Wendi Smith compared the experience to "jumping off a cliff."

That jump meant working with an assigned poet to create a new piece of art and a poem that worked together. But that wasn't as easy as it might sound.

"Poets and artists work in a solitary way, but we are visual and they are auditory," Grubola said. "We don't necessarily speak the same language."

The call for artists to make this leap came from poet and University of Louisville creative writing and English professor Jeff Skinner nearly two years ago. Skinner, who also is an artist member of Pyro, had immersed himself in photography in high school, years before he found himself making a life in writing.

Nearly seven years ago, his renewed involvement with photography led him to Pyro Gallery as a member artist. Since then he's had shows of his own works. Then several years ago, he got the idea of pairing member artists with poets from the region to see what would happen. It came, in part, from working with a non-Pyro artist, Laurie Doctor, who had asked him and other writers to write pieces based on her paintings.

"I thought a project with writers could broaden Pyro Gallery's audience into the literary community," Skinner said.

So, Skinner got together with another Louisville poet, Adam Day. He thought Day knew more poets outside of Skinner's network at U of L.

"We came up with some names. We got a list, and everybody said yes," Skinner said.

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Among the exhibit's artworks are installations, photography, printmaking, textiles, painting and ceramics. The poems appear with the pieces in different ways. Some are mounted apart but next to the artwork, some are framed within works and others have the poems more fully incorporated into the art. A few others invite visitors to contribute their own words to the pieces.

Skinner collaborated with poets Day and Jessica Farquhar by providing each of them with different projects he had already begun, to fuel their writings.

For some artists, the pairings stirred some skepticism. Poet Makalani Bandele and artist Wendi Smith said that was certainly the case for them.

"When Jeff put us together, it was like we had nothing in common," said Smith. "He's a young black man, and I'm an old white broad. He's an ordained minister, and I'm an agnostic. You could not find people more polar opposite."

But the two found that they shared interests in ancient cultures. So, Smith suggested including the idea of prayer sticks as used by the Zuni and Hopi Native Americans and a form based on a Japanese Shinto shrine. Her work "the six rivers run home" is taken from a line in Bandele's poem "blue heron."

"His poetry deals with the brink of a prayer," Smith said. "It has this bated-breath quality of sending something out and hoping for something in return. It gives me chills thinking about it. It's such a great poem."

She said he worked on the poem in part by asking her a series of prepared questions. To each question, he instructed her to ask him a related question.

While Smith often makes boxes adorned with paintings, with her work for "Double Vision" she used new materials. That included sticks that she found outside; she stripped their bark and applied Danish oil to preserve. She also included bells, based in part on many of Bandele's writings that refer to music.

"This was going outside my comfort zone and using materials I don't usually work with, but it opened a lot of ways of processing my ideas," she said.

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Bandele said he was surprised that after the first meeting the two knew what they were going to do.

"It's a personal lesson that once again I found it's silly to prejudge people or a situation," he said.

Grubola described her experience working with poet Lynnell Edwards similarly, but said she and Edwards had more in common — including their love of the outdoors and the ideas behind a sense of place.

"And our kids are doing similar things," Grubola said.

Because much of Edwards' work centered on her family history that dates back to her pioneering ancestors who settled in Mercer County in the 1770s, the two decided to take a field trip there. It included a stop at the family graveyard.

"It was spectacularly beautiful. I had never seen the Salt River like that," said Grubola, who added that Edwards' background was outside of her experience as a first-generation American (her parents were born in Scotland).

In the end, Grubola returned to Louisville and responded to Edwards' poem titled "Settlers (Cumberland Gap)" with "Settlements will cover the fertile land" in which Grubola strived to provide a Native American perspective.

For artist Susan Harrison and poet Martha Greenwald, their pairing brought a sense of homecoming. Both discovered they were raised in New Jersey, and both had fathers who were doctors.

"When we met, we didn't talk about art per se, but our lives," Greenwald recalled.

That included talk about growing up around the medical field (Greenwald said both of them had done office work for their fathers during their teenage years), as well as Greenwald's 2013 surgery for a benign brain tumor. During their conversation, she took out her CyberKnife mask made of mesh that covered her head during the surgery and put it over her face to show Harrison. Harrison followed her instincts.

"Spontaneously, I decided to photograph her," Harrison said.

While Greenwald hates to be photographed, she went along with Harrison.

At the time, Greenwald also told Harrison about a memoir she was writing about her father.

"At first, I thought that the subject matter was largely me," Greenwald said, "and that it seemed selfish. But then I realized that this was also very much about our fathers. Her father had Alzheimer's and my father was killed in an auto accident by a person whose vision was obstructed by malignant brain tumors."

Greenwald plans to read from her memoir as her reading on Feb. 5. She and a majority of the poets will read their work on consecutive Sundays during the run of the exhibit.

"I've seen the poetry and art come together in very different ways," Skinner said of the collaborations.

While the merging of the two art forms resulted in a variety of approaches to visual art and writing, Skinner said he sees all the outcomes as solutions to challenges that emerge when collaborating with others. He also writes in the exhibition catalogue that the exhibit illustrates that art and poetry are part of the same family.

"There's no doubt about these two," he writes of the art forms, "the same blood runs through their veins."

Reporter Elizabeth Kramer can be reached at (502) 582-4682. Follow her on Twitter at @arts_bureau.

DOUBLE VISION: A COLLABORATIVE EXHIBIT OF PYRO GALLERY ARTISTS & LOUISVILLE POETS

Curated by Jeff Skinner with Adam Day.

When: Through Feb. 15. Gallery hours, noon-6 p.m., Thursday through Saturday. Reception, Friday, 6 to 9 p.m.

Thursday Poetry Readings, 7 p.m.: Jan. 22 with Kristen Miller, Fred Smock, William Smith, Ellyn Lichvar and David Harrity; Jan. 29 with Sarah Gorham, Lynnell Edwards, Makalani Bandele, Annette Allen and Michael Estes; Feb. 5 with Sean Patrick Hill, Martha Greenwald, Adam Day, John James and Kathryn Welsh. The poets' partner artists will be at the readings to talk about the collaborations.

Where: Pyro Gallery, 909 E. Market St.

Information: (502) 587-0106; pyrogallery.com

DOUBLE VISION: ARTIST AND POET PAIRINGS

Keith Auerbach, artist; Bill Smith, poet

Carrie Burr, artist; John James, poet

Beverly Glascock, artist; Erin Keane, poet

Kay Polson Grubola, artist; Lynnell Edwards, poet

Susan Harrison, artist; Martha Greenwald, poet

Paula Keppie, artist; Sarah Gorhman, poet

Jeff Skinner, artist; Jessica Farquhar, poet

Bob Lockhart, artist; Kathryn Welsh, poet

Debra Lott, artist; Ellyn Lichvar, poet

John McCarthy, artist; Sean Patrick Hill, poet

Mike McCarty, artist; Michael Estes, poet

Susan Moffett, artist; Annette Allen, poet

Corie Neumayer, artist; Kristen Miller, poet

James (Chip) Norton, artist; Fred Smock, poet

C.J. Pressma, artist; David Harrity, poet

Jeff Skinner, artist; Adam Day, poet

Wendi Smith, artist; Makalani Bandele, poet