ART SPEAKS: Elizabeth Kerlikowske and Mary Hatch

Thursday, October 25, 2018
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
room 2008 at 6:00 p.m.

Join us for a lively conversation and poetry reading featuring painting by Mary Hatch and texts by poet Elizabeth Kerlikowske, both of whom rank among Kalamazoo’s best known and most accomplished visual artists and wordsmiths. Art Speaks is a collaboration between Hatch and Kerlikowske in which they explore the artistic relationships between visual and verse. Mary sends Elizabeth two images, title-less; Elizabeth writes and returns. The title is shared only after the writing because that could be too influential. The titles frequently add another layer to the collaboration.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske is the author of six chapbooks of poetry (Postcards, Her Bodies, Last Hula, Suicide Notes, Rib, Chain of Lakes), a collection of children’s stories (Before the Rain), and a prose poem memoir of her father (The Shape of Dad). Her first full length book of poetry is from Mayapple Press (Dominant Hand.) Her work has also been featured in several recent anthologies including Nothing to Declare: a Guide to the Flash Sequence, Solace, and the Michigan writers anthology published by WMU. She has won the Detroit Auto Dealers Short Story Contest twice, the So To Speak magazine poetry award in 2004, The Binnacle’s 2008 Ultra-short Fiction Grand Prize, and numerous other prizes. She has received fellowships to the Atlantic Center for the Arts twice, Ragdale twice, the Georgia Arts and Letters Conference. She has been publishing poetry and fiction in journals and magazines for over twenty years as well as children’s stories in Guideposts for Kids (online) and New Moon, A Magazine for Girls.
Elizabeth recently retired from Kellogg Community College and completed her doctorate at Western Michigan University in 2007. She is president of Friends of Poetry, an organization in Kalamazoo dedicated to the enjoyment of the reading and writing of poetry. The group runs the annual POEMS THAT ATE OUR EARS contest, sponsors a reading series, and used to choose one poem each year which becomes a poetry mural on a downtown Kalamazoo wall. 9 murals are still intact. She also makes visual art that is typicaly big or illuminated.

MARY HATCH’s work is included in more than 300 public and private collections in the US and Canada including the Michigan Commission on Arts in Public Places. She was a finalist in Michigan’s first Percent for Art Program for the new State Library/Museum/Archives Building. Her painting She Drops Her Glove and He is There received the Michigan Artists Competition Purchase Prize, and was added to the Michigan Collection. Two Michigan Council for the Arts Grants resulted in invitational exhibits for grant recipients and inclusion in “Artists in Michigan”, the Michigan Council for the Arts, 20th Anniversary Catalog. As well as winning two awards in the National Association of Women’s Annual Exhibits in NYC, Hatch has exhibited throughout the US with a focus on Michigan, Chicago and New York City. Mary Hatch’s work was included in the inaugural exhibition at Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts. Prior to this, her painting White Lies won the Grand & Purchase Prize in the West Michigan Area Show, adding this work to the permanent collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Her work has been the focus of numerous articles & reviews in such publications as Encore, The New Art Examiner, West Michigan Magazine, Women’s Quarterly Review NYC, Passages North, Chicago Artists Coalition, Ann Arbor News, The Detroit News, Artspeak New York, and The Reader Chicago and the Kalamazoo Gazette.

http://maryhatch.com