Ai (Photo courtesy of Oklahoma State University)
Paintings by Kim Young will be on display at the UA Poetry Center through September.
The paintings of local artist Kim Young and Ai, an award-winning poet, will be highlighted during two seperate exhibits at The University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Young is the founder of BICAS, or Bicycle Inter-Community Action & Salvage, a nonprofit organziation that serves as an education and recycling center for bicycles. The exhibit showcasing her work, "The Paintings of Kim Young," opened June 15 and will run through Sept. 25 in the center's Jeremy Ingall's Gallery.
Young, a painter living in nothern Arizona, also earned the Arizona Commission on the Arts Governor's Award.
The UA Poetry Center has also coordinated a new exhibit to feature the work of Ai, currently on the faculty at Oklahoma State University.
Ai, who has described herself as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas and grew up in Tucson. Her name means "love" in Japanese.
She is an award-winning poet who received bachelor's degree from the UA and her master's of fine arts degree from the University of California, Irvine.
"Ai writes a difficult poetry, a poetry of the dark heart of humanity. It is graphic and violent," said Rodney Phillips, a senior librarian at the Poetry Center.
"She writes about murder and abuse. She writes dramatic dialogues of the poor and forgotten, those who live on the edge of society: people in trouble and people causing trouble," Phillips said.
The display will include a collection of photographic portraits, a synopsis of each of the poet's seven published works and a number of signed books including several that Ai has inscribed.
The exhibit will remain on display through Aug. 15.
Ai earned the National Booko Award for Poetry in 1999 for her book, "Vice." "Sin," published in 1986 won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Earlier, her book "Killing Floor" received the 1978 Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Ai has received numerous other awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and others.
"She uses the technique of the dramatic monologue, and the speakers in her poems are not the poet," he added, saying Ai's earlier volumes used anonymous and marginalized speakers.
Her later works focused on historical figures, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, Elvis Presley, James Dean and others.
UA Poetry Center
The Poetry Center in the Helen S. Schaefer Building is located at 1508 E. Helen St. Parking is available in Zone 1 lots for free after 5 p.m. during the weekends and also throughout the weekends. To learn more about Poetry Center events, call (520) 626-3765.
Annie Guthrie
UA Poetry Center
(520) 626-4310