Poetry Event

Saturday, February 24, 2024 at 3pm ET

A.I.R. Gallery

In conjunction with her solo exhibition Goddesses + Emaciation Sylvia Netzer will present a poetry event at A.I.R. Gallery on Saturday, February 24, 2024 at 3pm. Featured readers will include Annabel Lee and Christopher Knowles.

Annabel Lee is the author of Minnesota Drift, Oracular Transcendentalism, Basket and Continental 34s. As translator, At the Heart of the World is a selection of her translations of Blaise Cendrars. She also translates Louise de Vilmorin from the French and Robert Walser from the Swiss-German. Her poetry, prose and essays have appeared in countless journals and in anthologies, including Corona Transmissions. As founder and publisher of Vehicle Editions, she is included in Poetics of the Press, interviews with poets who are also printers and publishers. Vehicle Editions authors and artists include Christopher Knowles, Richard Hell, Barbara Guest, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ted Berrigan, Alex Katz, Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette, among others. She has read her poetry, prose and translations widely and appeared on The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment as poet reading after Robert Wilson and Willem Dafoe when she read her own poems and from the Vehicle Edition Typings 1974-1977 by Christopher Knowles. She has performed old-time ballads she learned from her aunt Hally Wood at Jalopy, Passim’s and other venues. Her books, two-dimensional and three-dimensional collages and other artworks have been exhibited in New York, upstate and Manhattan, and in France, Germany and England. She has served on the boards of directors for The Center for Book Arts, New York, and The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

Christopher Knowles was born May 4, 1959. During his early years he created linguistic sound works. The theatre director Robert Wilson was given an audiotape of Christopher Knowles’ work Emily Likes the TV by George Klauber who had been Wilson’s professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then in December 1973, when Christopher Knowles’ parents brought him to Brooklyn Academy of Music for Wilson’s 12-hour theatrical work The Life and Times of Stalin, Wilson asked Knowles if he’d like to join him on the stage during the performance. Thus began a collaboration that would last for many years. Christopher Knowles’ book Typings 1974-1977 includes typewritten works that Knowles wrote, many of which were the libretto for the opera that Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs created called Einstein on the Beach. One of the collaborative works that Wilson and Knowles developed and performed together as a duo is Dialogue: Curious George. Christopher Knowles has performed his own solo work as well, including The Sundance Kid Is Beautiful, which was staged at the Martin Segal Theatre at CUNY Graduate Center in 2012 and at other venues. His visual work has been exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and at the Louvre in Paris, as well as many other exhibition spaces. Christopher Knowles: In a Word was a comprehensive exhibition of his paintings, typings, sculpture and other works was on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2015 and traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2017. A searchable archive of his work is at the Fales Library at New York University.

Sylvia Netzer received her M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University School of Arts. She is a professor and the director of the ceramics program at The City College of New York. Her work is in the collections of Sol LeWitt, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, and many other private and public collections. Netzer’s work has been featured in many publications, including on the cover of Ceramics Monthly and in Three Dimensions: Women Sculptors of the ’90s by Charlotte Streifer-Rubenstein; Ceramics: Mastering the Craft by Richard Zakin; Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expressions in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax by Joanne Mattera; Confrontational Ceramics: The Artist as Social Critic by Judith S. Schwartz; and Encaustic: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art With Wax by Lissa Rankin. She lives and works in New York City.