| reviews & features | galleries | art museums | schools & universities | other museums | hot links |

So proud she was

Artists interpret Emily Dickinson's poetry

by Leon Nigrosh

LANGUAGE AS OBJECT: EMILY DICKINSON AND CONTEMPORARY ART at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, through June 1.

We will never know who Emily Dickinson really was, but her cryptic poetry continues to affect American art and culture more than a century after her death. Born in 1830, Dickinson spent most of her life inside the family homestead in Amherst. Many people still think of her as a recluse, but through her voluminous correspondence and almost daily chats with a select group of visitors, she was a worldly individual quite unlike most Victorian women of her time.

She was content to stay at home, reading, baking, and writing her eccentrically personal style of poetry. Ironically, she kept most of her work a secret and actually asked that her manuscripts be burned at the time of her death. Fortunately for us, two slim volumes of her work were published several years after she died in 1886. Publication and discussion of her abstract poems have become a major industry, and her influence is more far-reaching than she ever could have imagined.

Susan Danly, the acting director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, has assembled an exhibition of 14 visual artists' works based on Dickinson's oblique writings. Preeminent New England artist Will Barnet translates Dickinson's poems directly through his paintings. In The Glass, Barnet presents us with a likeness of Dickinson (based on her only daguerreotype known to exist) as she contemplates her mirror image holding a glass of wine. In another sparse canvas, Barnet shows a pensive woman combing her hair.

In contrast, Aife Murray's installation Pantry DRAWer concentrates not on a specific poem, but more on the relationship Dickinson had with her Irish-born domestic servants. A neon shamrock, ironing boards, silverware, tea service, and linen aprons hanging out to dry, along with altered images of Dickinson dispersed among Hispanic milagros extends the focus beyond the Amherst homestead on to issues of ethnicity and social separation.

By photographing women with words painted directly on their nude bodies, Leslie Dill presents powerful interpretations of Dickinson's poetry. Her photolithograph A Word Made Flesh: Throat graphically brings out the fear noted by the poet about her body and soul. Rolled up Poem Girl features a life-sized photolitho image of a nude woman with Dickinson's words, "I took my power in my hand," emblazoned on her black skin in white paint. These and Dill's other works in paper and diaphanous cloth attempt to relate Dickinson's opaque writings to issues of sexuality, empowerment -- or the lack of it -- and the transitory nature of life.

Barbara Penn's five large installation pieces dominate the show, not merely for their size, but also for their visual and thought-provoking impact. Her 12-by-12-foot assemblage I make the Yellow to the Pies draws heavy reference from Dickinson's poem of the same name. Laid out somewhat akin to a formal Japanese stone garden, the work has arranged groups of stacked rolling pins and trays of egg-shapes within the confines of actual honeycombs. An apiary filled with pie plates completes the installation and connects the work directly to Dickinson's professed love of dessert-making.

Penn's After great pain, a formal feeling comes borrows a line from Dickinson for its title. Here, Penn implies the definition of the term "pain" as it relates to childbirth. The central object of this 12-foot-square installation is a bare, paint-crumbling crib filled with eggs that have hatched an assortment of items. The background wall can be construed as being made up of breasts or eggs. Each of these components comes fraught with its own psychological references, but after Penn has so artfully combined them, the entire work flows open to myriad interpretations.

Paul Katz, Linda Schwalen, and Worcester-born Robert Cumming each incorporates dense doses of Dickinson's work in their paintings, drawings, and prints. Barbara Morgan's photographs freeze Martha Graham's dance movements in homage to Dickinson, while Jerry Leibling takes us on a photo tour of Dickinson's house. Carla Rae Johnson's hidden volcano, Mary Frank's cut-paper drawings, and works by surrealist sculptor Joseph Cornell, minimalist Roni Horn, and ceramist Judy Chicago round out this fascinating collection of diverse works that pay tribute to the poetry of Dickinson, each in their own unique way.

The Mead Art Museum is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Call (413) 542-2335.