Museum of New Mexico Media Center Press Release

Get Your Haiku On

New Mexico Museum of Art

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 02, 2011

MEDIA CONTACT

Get Your Haiku On

A Celebration of the Roadsign Haiku Project

An afternoon of Haiku activities featuring Santa Fe Poet Laureate Joan Logghe, Axle Contemporary, and the New Mexico Museum of Art takes place Sunday, September 25, 2011. The public is invited to free workshops, readings, and more celebrating the completion of the innovative Roadsign Haiku Project and publication of a documentary catalogue. A series of events are planned that day between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m.

Schedule:

1:00-2:00 p.m. Two workshops take place in the museum galleries. The first features Jerry Wellman of Axle Contemporary guiding participants through a multi-disciplinary exercise called “Read and Draw” in Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment. In the second, participants in Santa Fe Poet Laureate Joan Logghe’s “Write what you see” workshop in How the West in One will create ekphrastic poetry, a poetry style that comments on another art form. Visitors may participate in one or both activities.

2:00 p.m. In the Museum’s Courtyard, most of the 32 poets in the project gather to read their work for the Roadsign Haiku Project. An “open mic” follows for those wanting to share the poems they wrote in the museum galleries.

Next up, Ellen Zieselman, the museum’s curator of education, will host the first-ever New Mexico Museum of Art Speed Haiku Event. Inspired participants will have two minutes to write an original haiku on a randomly selected theme.

The Roadsign will be outside the museum—a final opportunity to snap a photo of what will soon to be a piece of Santa Fe art history, and Axle Contemporary presenting its current exhibition Harvest.

“We were honored to be a site for the Roadsign Haiku Project this summer,” said Zieselman. “It was a real treat driving around Santa Fe and coming across such imaginative poetry. We wanted to celebrate the project by bringing all the poems and poets together for a fun afternoon at the Museum.”

The event is appropriate for audiences of all ages and adults are encouraged to bring their young ones.

Information on Roadsign Haiku Project

Funded through a Kickstarter.com campaign in spring 2011, the project goals were to purchase the sign and curate a series of Haiku poetry presenting two new poems (one on each side of the sign) each week for four months during the summer of 2011.

Axle Contemporary’s co-owners and directors Jerry Wellman and Matthew Chase-Daniel said at the project’s outset, “Automobile passengers, bike riders, and pedestrians will enjoy poetry in consistently unexpected places throughout Santa Fe.  Two poems x 16 weeks = 32 poems, liberated from the page and set free to infiltrate the consciousness of the people:  ¡Que Viva La Poesia!”

The poems were selected by Santa Fe Poet Laureate Joan Logghe. Wellman and Chase-Daniel installed the poems and roadsign in its various locations around Santa Fe all summer. The roadsign was in front of the New Mexico Museum of Art for a week the beginning of August.

Media Contact:

Ellen Zieselman,

Curator of Education

ellen.zieselman@state.nm.us

505-476-5075

 

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The New Mexico Museum of Art is a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

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