Art and Poetry in Vancouver

A fervent creative confluence that spread across the country continues to resonate.

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The arrival from San Francisco of Ellen and Warren Tallman to teach in the English department at UBC in 1956 is taken as a touchstone moment, one that initiated a creative confluence in Vancouver.

Curator Lee Plested has attempted to capture the influences that evolved from that moment and bring them to the present in a survey exhibition, whose title comes from a poem by Robin Blaser.

In the Sixties, the Tallmans invited several artists from the San Francisco renaissance crowd to Vancouver, including Blaser and fellow poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, as well as the visual artist Jess.

They had an inspiring and generative impact on many young creators, including those in The poets have always preceded: art and poetry in Vancouver 1960-present. The show is on view until April 27 at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver.

The influences were rhizomatic, says Plested, who envisioned an exhibition with “resonant examples of experimentation in art and poetry to uncover some of this fervent conversation, collaboration and innovation.”

The show, however, continues past this original moment. It draws, in eclectic fashion, on works covering five decades, using an associative and, to a degree, random aesthetic with pieces from private collections and artists’ studios.

Visitors can see collage, sculpture, textual paintings, visual poetry, conceptual work, specialized pamphlets and broadsheets, and even bookshelves containing some 600 publications selected by writer and artist Colin Browne from the library of the Kootenay School of Writing, a Vancouver writing collective founded in 1984.

Walking through the show, the experience is more disjunctive than seamless. But by the end, one has absorbed a flavorful fusion.

We see two mixed-media collages by Jess; large alphabetic works by Pierre Coupey – a 1976 acrylic and two 1987 graphite pieces; and a 1979 photographic narrative by Marian Penner Brancroft that also includes hand-written phrases of haiku.

Roy Kiyooka’s expansive repertoire is represented by a wall-sized array of images from his disruptive Fontainebleau Dream Machine: 18 Frames from a Book of Rhetoric, which integrates modern and historic images.

Colour dazzles in 10 paintings by bill bissett, and Judith Copithorne’s fluid poem-drawings, the earliest from 1965 and the latest from 1992, link to the international concrete poem movement.

Also included is a set of ceramic bowls by Judy Chartrand, described by Plested as reflecting “on social and economic inequality in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, where she grew up.”

A vitrine shows products of activism in the 1990s, including publications by queer and feminist writers such as Catriona Strang, Nancy Shaw and Lisa Robertson.

Many more artists are shown and cited than can be addressed here. As Plested says: “There are 80 objects in the show, there could have been 800; we touch on 20 poets, there should be 200.”

From Vancouver, the movement spread across the country and still resonates today. As Coupey observes, Vancouver continues to be “a remarkable locus for a deep and lively cross-fertilization between poets and visual artists.” This show serves as a valuable springboard for further explorations.

The poets have always preceded: art and poetry in Vancouver 1960-present is on view at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver from Jan. 26 to April 27, 2019.

Griffin Art Projects

1174 Welch Street, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7P 1B2

604-985-0136

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