Poetry into Painting: Michael Dolen
Paints Twelve American Poets

For the July 2002 session of the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, the American painter Michael Dolen has created a dozen digital prints built around poems by twelve writers who have been closely associated with the institute, as teachers and as visiting writers. This exhibition highlights a remarkable interaction between library text and visual image, in which each work in the series manages both to serve the poem — by providing a plausible illustrative context — and to establisj an autonomous visual authority. It also demonstrates some of the unexpected uses to which the relatively new digital medium can combine processes and activities, so that it is not at all misleading to speak of the works in the exhibition both as “prints” and as “paintings.”

-Robert Boyers
Director, New York State Summer Writer’s Institute Editor, Salmagundi