I want to propose a group exhibition for national poetry month 2027 (April-May) that would be a collaboration between a local poet I know, Andrew Cini and several painters. Andrew is finishing up his poetry chapbook that is inspired by the City of Wilmington, and I was thinking it would be amazing to have an exhibition where artists offered a visual interpretation of his work. I have artists in mind already to invite, but I would also likely do an open call for artists, specifically painters.
Ideally, for the local community, I would line up additional public programming, including both art and poetry workshops, and poetry readings.
Because of the coordination and logistics involved in this collaboration, the sooner I know whether this is something the gallery is open to, the sooner I can begin to coordinate and begin recruiting artists for the exhibition.
EXHIBIT DESCRIPTION AS OF 2/4/2026
This exhibition begins with a book of poems that moves through Wilmington not as a tourist, but as one born of it: attentive, vulnerable, and awake to the city’s shifting atmospheres. The poems are richly descriptive, but their deepest power is not in what they show. It’s in how they notice, observe space and environment: brick and river, storefront light at dusk, the soft noise of neighborhood life, and the harder outlines of infrastructure and history pressing into the present. The poet’s voice is that of a flâneur — strolling, pausing, drifting, returning, letting place reveal itself in layers.
Rather than illustrating the poems, the participating artists translate them. Poetry functions here as a generative score: a set of cues for rhythm, pressure, palette, and pacing. Through abstraction, mark-making, and mood-driven color, the artists recompose the poems’ sensations into visual fields, works that carry the tempo of walking, the friction of streets, the hush of glass and dusk, and the recurring tension between tenderness and fracture. Each piece emerges from an exchange between language and material.
Organized around the act of strolling, the exhibition invites viewers to move through the gallery as one moves through a town, slowly, receptively, and in proximity to others. The exhibition privileges drift over destination, atmosphere over narrative, and accumulation over single-point meaning. What results is a collective portrait of place: not a map of landmarks, but a living expression of sensation, memory, and social texture, what a town becomes when it is truly observed.
