The exhibition, “Poem & Picture,” at the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut is holding an opening reception on April 1, 2010 from 5 to 7:00pm.  The exhibition is curated by Eve Perry, Assistant Curator at the William Benton Museum, and features collaborative works between 20th century poets and artists found in rare editions, little magazines, broadsides, and artists books, the bulk of which are from the Dodd Research Center collections.  The event marks one of the largest loans of materials ever arranged between the Benton and the Dodd Research Center. 

Poem & Picture features the collaborative visions of twentieth-century artists and poets, works that combine the disciplines of art and poetry in a way that each is complimented and enhanced by the other. They are poems and pictures intended to be experienced together, whether they are bound side-by-side in a limited edition book or as image and script integrated into a single work. Included in the exhibition are pages from the Russian literary avant-garde book Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (1914) by Olga Rozanova and Kazimir Malevich. Selections from 21 Etchings and Poems (1960) present collaborations by Willem De Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, Peter Grippe and Dylan Thomas, and Franz Klein and Frank O’Hara. The Ariel Poems (1927-1954), a collection of limited edition illustrated poems, is represented by T.S. Eliot and E. McKnight Kauffer, and D.H. Lawrence and Althea Willoughby, among others.