Gallery exhibition celebrates Creeley’s 100th birthday

“Robert Creeley: Active Complement,” an exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late poet and longtime UB faculty member, will open March 26 in the second-floor gallery of the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts.

Drawn from the UB Poetry Collection and UB Art Galleries Collection, the exhibition, which runs through My 23, explores Creeley’s various approaches to collaborative artmaking and its central focus in his creative and poetic practice.

It’s part of Buffalo-wide programming marking the centenary of Creeley’s birth. “Active Complement” was organized by the UB Art Galleries with the UB Poetry Collection and the UB Poetics Program, of which Creeley was a founder.

A Creeley-focused symposium will be held May 21-22.

Often cited as one of the most important and influential poets of the last half-century, Creeley was a member of the UB faculty from 1966 to 2003, when he left to become a Distinguished Professor at Brown University. While at UB, he held the positions of SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetics.

He died in 2005.

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 Creeley engaged in a distinct collaborative process with each artist he worked with. His 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. “What we both wanted, then,” Creeley said, “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 in “Active Complement” was a similarly generative open-endedness.
 
“The Poetry Collection is thrilled to partner with UB Art Galleries on their exhibition of Robert Creeley’s collaborations with artists — a wonderful companion to and expansion of our own current centennial Creeley exhibition in Special Collections — and to celebrate this landmark anniversary of Buffalo’s beloved poet,” says James Maynard, curator of the Poetry Collection.