Poetry School
Jill Magi
January 20 - March 9, 2020
How does poetry come to be and what does it do? Poetry School is a teaching, publishing, performance, and archival display space organized around this question. The school’s curriculum begins where Jill Magi’s book of poetry SPEECH leaves off—with the proposal that poetry, art, and life is made through recursivity. Magi wrote SPEECH over the course of five years while simultaneously learning to weave, while taking walks in her Abu Dhabi neighborhood, and while researching comparative notions of freedom, the modern subject, and extra-citizenship. Rather than determining an arrival, SPEECH, as a record of continuous encounter, makes a lyrical argument for belonging and place, book and artefact, language and literature as inherently unstable, becoming, and communal. During her walks she often took bits and pieces from the environment home with her—a feather, a twig, a palm frond, a paver—in order to paint likenesses of these objects, and, as an embroiderer, she did so in a slow and “textilic” or piece-by-piece manner. These paintings, along with stacks of hand-woven cloth and handmade book objects, create the archive on display in the first part of the gallery. Poetry School invites visitors, students, and resident writers to encounter the archive and to then linger in the space beyond—a space for reading, listening to, talking about, and making poetry with others. During one-day “residencies” with regional writers, the gallery become a place for making literature with a “mobile micro-press” designed by Magi to house all the implements of chapbook making: bookbinding tools, a small printer, staplers, needle and string, and paper.
/
About the artist
Jill Magi works in text, image, and textile. She is the author of six full-length books of poetry, all published by
small presses, and numerous handmade books which are held at the University at Buffalo special collections library. Her most recent book is entitled SPEECH and was published by Nightboat Books in September of 2019. Jill has had solo exhibitions at the New York University Project Space gallery and with Tashkeel in Dubai; group shows at Apexart, the New York Center for Book Arts, Arcade 6 Gallery at Columbia College Chicago, and the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery; and was a resident artist with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program and the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. An educator with over 20 years of experience, Jill has taught at large state-funded universities, as well as experimental colleges and art schools. Her first teaching job was in a South Bronx adult literacy program whose curriculum was based on the writings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. She is currently on the visual arts and literature/creative writing faculty at New York University Abu Dhabi. From 2001 to 2011, Jill ran a chapbook press called Sona Books, and in the UAE she is a founding member, along with Shamma Al Bastaki and Sarah Al Mehairi, of a literature initiative called JARA Collective.