Robert Creeley: Active Complement
Photo: Douglas Levere. Courtesy of University Archives, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Drawn from the UB Poetry Collection and UB Art Galleries Collection in celebration of Creeley’s centenary year, this exhibition explores Robert Creeley’s various approaches to collaborative artmaking, and its central focus in his creative and poetic practice.
The earliest artist books are known as “livre d’artiste” pairings of artistic and poetic output using existing works by both artists and writers. But Robert Creeley engaged in a distinct collaborative process with each artist he worked with. Creeley’s poems sometimes responded to visual art, sometimes prompted the creation of new art, and sometimes were created in simultaneous dialogue with an artist. His approach was elastic, modified to fit the needs and interests of each collaboration. This elasticity is especially notable in Creeley’s collaboration with Marisol, of which Creeley stated that, “What we both wanted, then, was an active complement, rather than a descriptive prose text and/or a sense of illustration in the images themselves.” Creeley’s poetic style indeed tends to lend itself to such an approach. It is not illustrative, but redolent and suggestive: evoking sensations or memories without giving the reader a specific reference. The throughline for many of the artist collaborators on display was a similarly generative open-endedness.
Active Complement is part of a Buffalo-wide programming effort for the 100th anniversary of Robert Creeley’s birth. Active Complement is organized with the UB Poetry Collection and the UB Poetics Program, of which Robert Creeley was a founder and longtime faculty member. A Creeley focused symposium will be held May 21st-22nd, 2026.