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Together, Santa Fe Poet Laureate Elizabeth Jacobson, Axle Contemporary, YouthWorks, Santa Fe Community Screenprinting, and The New Mexico School for the Arts have been working on a project over the past year. 60 high school students have crafted poems, designed excerpts from their poems with images to be screenprinted as shirts and prints, and created photographic portraits. The entire project is collected in an anthology published by Axle Contemporary Press, and presented as exhibitions at Axle and the Railyard Performance Center, and in a reading at Collected Works.

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The Anthology: Everything Feels Recent When You're Far Away

Collected Works or at www.axleart.com/books

Axle Contemporary Broadsides Exhibition

April 30 - May 23. See daily location at www.axleart.com

Railyard Performance Center Exhibition

April 23 - May 23 on the east side exterior of the Railyard Performance Center

1611 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe.

Collected Works Poetry Reading

Friday, April 23, 6 pm

Readings by: Artemisio Romero y Carver, Genesi Sedillo, Ella Seckler, Katy-Ice Johnson, Zane Demmon, Oz Leshem, Sarita Sol Gonzalez, Serenity Medina, Gabriel Boston-Friedman, Arwen Scarlata, Claudia Marin and others. If you missed the reading live (or want to see and hear it again. have a watch now: https://fb.watch/55eVbP7-E2/

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Congratulations to Elizabeth Jacobson, recipient of a Poets Laureate Fellowship from The American Academy of Poets, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to support this project for Santa Fe!



In collaboration with Axle Contemporary and YouthWorks' Santa Fe Community Screenprinting studio, Jacobson has created a poetry and visual arts venture for high school teenagers encompassing the study and crafting of poems, graphic design and silk screening of poetry on t-shirts, portrait photography, readings, and publication of an anthology.

Elizabeth Jacobson
Elizabeth Jacobson, originally from New York, has lived for over thirty years in New Mexico.  She received an MFA from Columbia University in Creative Writing and a BA from Rollins College in English Literature. She is the author, most recently, of Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019) which won the New Measure Poetry Prize selected by Marianne Boruch, and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book.  Boruch writes, “Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems.”  Jacobson’s other books include a full-length collection Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012) and two chapbooks from dancing girl press: Are the Children Make Believe? (2017) and A Brown Stone (2015). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which since 2013 has conducted weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in Santa Fe, New Mexico. WingSpan has received four grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and a Community Partners Award from the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families. She is the Reviews Editor for the online literary journal Terrain.org. and teaches poetry workshops regularly in the Santa Fe community.  In July 2019, Jacobson was appointed Poet Laureate for the City of Santa Fe.

 

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“As we face the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people are turning to poetry for comfort and courage. We are honored and humbled in this moment of great need to fund poets who are talented artists and community organizers, who will most certainly help guide their communities forward,” said Jennifer Benka, President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets.


The Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states. Founded in 1934, the organization produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; organizes National Poetry Month; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides award-winning resources to K–12 educators, including the Teach This Poem series; administers the American Poets Prizes; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture. Through its prize program, the organization annually awards more funds to individual poets than any other organization, giving a total of $1,250,000 to more than 200 poets at various stages of their careers. This year, in response to the global health crisis, the Academy launched the #ShelterInPoems initiative, inviting members of the public to select poems of comfort and courage from its online collection to share with others on social media. The initiative culminated in the organization’s first-ever virtual reading, which was watched more than 25,000 times by viewers in more than 40 countries around the world. The Academy is also one of seven national organizations that comprise Artist Relief, a multidisciplinary coalition of arts grantmakers and a consortium of foundations working to provide resources and funding to the country’s individual poets, writers, and artists who are impacted by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

 

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“We are gratified to support the poets laureate fellows as they engage their communities around the unprecedented challenges of our moment, making work that provides meaning, brings beauty, and helps us, in Lucille Clifton’s words, ‘sail through this to that,’” said Elizabeth Alexander, poet and President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to strengthen, promote, and defend the centrality of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse, fair, and democratic societies.  To this end, our core programs support exemplary and inspiring institutions of higher education and culture. The Arts and Cultural Heritage program seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and conservation practices in the arts, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for these disciplines.  The program supports the work of outstanding artists, curators, conservators, and scholars, and endeavors to strengthen performing arts organizations, art museums, research institutes, and conservation centers.

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Wilderness Acts 2018

Art-in-Nature

 

Cannupa Hanska Luger & Ian Kuali’i 

Frederick Spaulding

Dana Chodzko

Munson Hunt

Rick Yoshimoto & Chrissie Orr

Susan Bruneni

Susannah Abbey

Paula Castillo

Brian Fleetwood

Gina Telcocci

Kathleen McCloud

 

with The Santa Fe Botanical Garden's

Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve

 

September 1 – 23 in Axle

 

All of September and October at the wetlands preserve

 

Opening for both shows: at the wetlands preserve, Saturday,  Sept.1 , 1- 4 pm

Bouquet

Bouquet

Frederick Spaulding

Anemopsis

Anemopsis

Brian Fleetwood

Anemopsis

Anemopsis

Brian Fleetwood

Susannah Abbey

Susannah Abbey

Migrations: A Query

Susannah Abbey

Susannah Abbey

Migrations: A Query

Kathleen McCloud

Kathleen McCloud

Leave it to Beavers

Kathleen McCloud

Kathleen McCloud

Leave it to Beavers

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

Site Specific Land Acknowledgement, Healing Action and Indigenous Seed Dispersal, Cannupa Hanska Luger in Collaboration with Ian Kuali'i.

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

Site Specific Land Acknowledgement, Healing Action and Indigenous Seed Dispersal, Cannupa Hanska Luger in Collaboration with Ian Kuali'i.

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

Site Specific Land Acknowledgement, Healing Action and Indigenous Seed Dispersal, Cannupa Hanska Luger in Collaboration with Ian Kuali'i. Image credit: Dylan McLaughlin

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

Site Specific Land Acknowledgement, Healing Action and Indigenous Seed Dispersal, Cannupa Hanska Luger in Collaboration with Ian Kuali'i. Image credit: Dylan McLaughlin

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

Site Specific Land Acknowledgement, Healing Action and Indigenous Seed Dispersal, Cannupa Hanska Luger in Collaboration with Ian Kuali'i. Image credit: Dylan McLaughlin

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

artists on site, June, 2018

Tethered 2018

Tethered 2018

unfired clay and seed offerings

UP/ROOTED

UP/ROOTED

Rick Yoshimoto and Chrissie Orr

UP/ROOTED

UP/ROOTED

Rick Yoshimoto and Chrissie Orr

UP/ROOTED

UP/ROOTED

Rick Yoshimoto and Chrissie Orr

UP/ROOTED

UP/ROOTED

Rick Yoshimoto at work

Lovers and Friends

Lovers and Friends

Dana Chodzko

Lovers and Friends

Lovers and Friends

Dana Chodzko

Lovers and Friends

Lovers and Friends

Dana Chodzko

Lovers and Friends

Lovers and Friends

Dana Chodzko

Mudma

Mudma

Gina Telcocci

Mudma

Mudma

Gina Telcocci

Mudma

Mudma

Gina Telcocci

Mudma

Mudma

Gina Telcocci

Mudma

Mudma

Gina Telcocci

Reclamation (small) 1, 2 & 3

Reclamation (small) 1, 2 & 3

Munson Hunt

Reclamation (small) 1, 2 & 3

Reclamation (small) 1, 2 & 3

Munson Hunt

This pair of exhibitions explores the relationship between art and nature, creates awareness of our local natural resources, and promotes wetland and ecological conservation. The artists will create ephemeral sculptural artworks using natural materials in sites in the Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve in La Cienega. Works will be on view at the preserve throughout the months of September and October. A companion exhibition of related works by the same artists will open in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery on September 1 and continue through September 23. This is the third iteration of the Wilderness Acts Biennial, which began in 2014. Works in this exhibition include a small shelter constructed from "invasive" saplings, a day-long performance ritual of seed distribution, and beavers sculpted from mud.

The Santa Fe Botanical Garden's Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve is a 35-acre nature preserve and home to a rare natural cienega (marsh) and hosts a bountiful diversity of plants and wildlife.

 

 

presented by Axle Contemporary and the Santa Fe Botanical Garden

 

 

  • DIRECTIONS: The preserve is located on the I-25 West Frontage Road south of Santa Fe. From I-25 take Exit 271 for “La Cienega” and turn right onto West Frontage Road heading north. The parking lot entrance is 1½ miles north after turning onto West Frontage Road. From New Mexico State Road 599 (NM-599), turn south onto West Frontage Road heading toward the Downs at Santa Fe Race Track. The parking lot entrance is two miles south of the Downs at Santa Fe Race Track.

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