ARTIST & POET BIOS- ALLEVIATING HUNGER EKPHRASTIC ART AUCTION

 Note: Please click on images to enlarge for better viewing.

I'm hoping you won't get tired of me beating this drum and tune me out before Saturday, Dec. 3 at 2pm eastern because that's a big day for the collaboration among Poetry X Hunger, The Poartry Project, and Feed the Children. That's the day the Art Auction to Alleviate Hunger kicks off. 

By now you probably know that a few multitalented artists created works of art inspired by poems published on Poetry X Hunger, the world's first website dedicated to poetry about hunger. You might even know that all the proceeds from the auction and donation campaign will be going to Feed the Children, the international organization dedicated to assisting children and families in need.

I'm guessing you don't know who those artists are and which poems were chosen for inspiration from the Poetry X Hunger website. That's the purpose of this post: to introduce you to the artists and representative samples of their work (Ya don't think I'd give away the actual auction items, do you?); and to the poets and their poems. I've only included excerpts of the poems here, but there are links to the all of the full poems as published on Poetry X Hunger. 

I've listed the visual artists' bios with a representative piece of art that is not a part of the auction first, then the name of the poet, their poem title (with live link), and the beginning of the poem.  

Barbara Ezell has been a librarian/educator as vocation and hobbyist artist for many years, with expressions in various media: film, mosaics, photography, shadow boxes, paper marbling, collage, epoxy clay, and jewelry making. She has an MFA in film/video and create personal films. Over time she has been a member artist of Woman Made Gallery and exhibited in a few WMG shows and at Chicago area libraries and universities. Currently, she makes original jewelry: pendants, pins and earrings from decorated tin and rejuvenated jewelry, and shadow boxes featuring my jewelry. She calls her sculptural pieces Mystic Muses.  

Barbara's inspiration was Ann Bracken's American Madonna. The first stanza of the poem reads:

Hunger wears a face full of hope
like the girl on the magazine cover
cradling a loaf of white bread
as if it’s a miracle. Tonight she will
sleep with food in her tummy.

Doze Yolaine Butler is the second child of eight children. She realized at a young age that she was put on this planet to create. She likes to tell people, “My Father is a Creator; I’m just in the family business.” Her design aesthetic is using recycled/recyclable materials. She creates apparel and accessories, papercrafts, jewelry, small home furnishings, poetry, and the list goes on! Her “day job” is as a professor of merchandising, textiles, and design at a university in the southern U.S. She gives her time, talents, and treasure to organizations that help to improve the quality of life of individuals, families, and communities.

Doze's artwork is the one piece in the auction that was not inspired by poetry published on the Poetry X Hunger website. The poem accompanying Doze's piece was an ekphrastic collaboration among Hiram, JC, and I after we were inspired by Doze's work. The poem is titled This Quitch and the first stanza reads:

Is this the shape of things to come

the shape of satisfaction snaking

through multitudinous existence?

Elaine Weiner-Reed is a visual artist, writer, mother, and life- and earth-lover. Art is her happy place, her freedom, her burden, her dreams, and her vocation. She loves the physicality of painting and sculpting, and she approaches each piece with anticipation, hope, and joy, knowing that new discoveries await her. Elaine’s studio is at once playground, office, manufacturing facility, schoolhouse, and dance studio. Entering her studio, she turns on music and tunes into intuition and emotions. She moves around each work in an improvisational dance, the moods, gestures, and energy uniquely connecting her with each piece. As she splashes, pours, draws, and sculpts with paint and plaster, she tunes out the world. Focused on individuals impacted by transience and human frailty, her figurative work juxtaposes strength and inner beauty with vulnerability and external imperfections. She lets the form and placement of figures imply relationships and subsurface content, ultimately creating mysteries for others to reimagine. Instagram: @ewrartist.

Elaine's painting was inspired by Abha Das Sarma's The Wait. It begins:

As I write
Someone, somewhere
Waits-
I imagine "What it is";, to say
Hungry and stay, that way

Elle Dooley is a multidisciplinary artist creating at the crossroads of word and image. She has a living passion for literature and the arts, lettering, illustration, and hand bound books. She produces constructed works using both digital and mixed media collage, and she is the author of a soon to be published oracle deck, Archetypes of Time.

Elle's artwork for the auction was inspired by Henry Crawford's The Fruits of Famine, which begins like this:

On those nights we traced
the shapes of fruit until the dark
became our eyes.
On those nights we left our fields
unhearing the crack of broken roots,
the silence of dying ground.

Heather Swick was born and raised in the United States and now lives in Sydney, Australia. She has a love for connecting with others and nurturing friendships-especially through travel and learning about new cultures. Her background is in the counselling field, and she really admires the good work that organizations and people of goodwill are bringing to life and aim to support them in the ways that she is able to. She cares about Mother Earth, vegan living, and supporting the arts.

Heather's auction piece was prompted by Patience (Essence) Gumbo's Hunger, which opens with:

It rumbles
Like the sound before a thunderstorm
An inner ache, like that of a woman in travail follows after
I toss and turn and hope
Tonight will be better

JC Wayne is a poet and artist ("poartist") specializing in ekphrasis, nature and existential poetry that explores inner and outer landscapes; visual artist noted for using eco-friendly, plant-based materials; cartographer of the unseen; poetry and art adventure guide; certified creative aging teaching artist and emissary of beauty, perception, insight and discovery. Her calling and goal as founder of The Poartry Project is building loving worlds through loving words and art by applying the practice of "poartry" - the highly-trained, uniquely-adept artistry she has conceived and pioneers. Poartry is the wielding, interpreting and translating the energy of language as words and visuals consciously, skillfully and systematically for good. Her inaugural book of poetry is Voicing Art: Poetry of Space | Place | Time (2019). She is currently working on a second volume, Voicing Art: Poetry in Place, and a book sharing her pioneering practice of poartry, Poartry: Creating with the Energy of Language as a Force of Good. Her art has appeared in a variety of solo and group gallery exhibitions and in online publications, as well as populating her hand-made Golden Threads of Good Books for Children & the Young-at-Heart. WEBSITE: poartry.org, INSTAGRAM: @thepoartryproject

JC created multiple pieces of art inspired by different poems. Below are the beginning lines of the poems:

Ger Duffy's Towards Lecanvey:

Stop a moment by the idle wall, look
right to the red rusting boathouse, tall trees
whispering, sheep bleating. Look left, follow
the waves, their bluegreen sheen domed by the sky,
bend and dip with the coast road.

Kim B. Miller's The Hunger Dialect:

We sip on tea flavored with righteousness indignation
Add a touch of honey dripping in our own gluttony
While we slowly speak the dialect of hunger
We claim to be ambitious on solutions
But truth says we have never met

Faith P. Nelson's Two-faced Hunger:

Stomachs dressed in cardboard
signs gurgle will clean anything
for a living wage. Roots dry rot
waiting for hire.

Heyssel Mariel Molinares Sosa's Hambre which is published in the author's native Spanish as well as English:

Hunger, the one that makes no distinction
Regardless of language, age, or color
The feeling that eats our guts without compassion
For many, it is the reason for their pain

Randy Weber has been a passionate photographer since 2008 and started out as a street photographer in Chicago. Feeling inspired by the works of Jason Lee and William Eggleston, he began photographing landscapes and abandoned places. Randy is a cyclist and loves taking road trips for his photography. You can see more of his work here. It's worth having to sign up to view. Was to me anyway.

Randy is offering two pieces inspired by two poems:

Brian Manyati's  Imma be cool crooning alway which opens with:

I wanna be there
Parachuted like, a hovering drone
Towering as a dish sitted
On space or orbit
I wanna lend a hand
With terra-pixel lenses
My bird's eye_ viewing
All silos spread about

Lisa Reynolds' I'm Hungry, which begins:

The words aren’t spoken
They’re said through eyes
That watch others eat
Longing for a carrot
Piece of apple
Potato chip

Skyler Dagucon is an aspiring deck creator. they are a crystal enthusiast and a caregiver, an artist in transformation and human in transition.

Skyler's inspiration for their auction piece came from Teri Cross Davis' Shutter.  The poem begins:

And if you could go back, you would
You would pick the child up, gingerly like a newborn
cradling her large head, thin-skinned body, jutting bones,
And no mother you, but you would have hushed her

What a group of talented individuals! We'll be sharing additional details right up to the kickoff, but if you have questions, please reach out to PoetryXHunger@gmail.com. Till soon....T. A.