Yellow Chair Salon is excited to announce a new Symposia! Disguise The Limit with esteemed poet and art writer John Yau, along with Symposia! faculty Astrid Dick and Michael David. This online Symposia! is both studio and critique based and will culminate in an exhibition. 

In the critique aspect, cohorts will have three opportunities to present their work for John to critique, and several opportunities to present to Symposia! faculty Astrid Dick and Michael David in small private “pods” where John will not be present. The critique of the artists’ work, throughout the course, will allow artists to reflect on their own evolving practice, through the feedback provided by faculty and their cohorts. 

The studio aspect is based on a dialogue around poetry and language led by John Yau, who in the form of “collaboration” will offer poems and other examples of writing to the participants as catalysts for them to react through visual works as well as providing additional readings. He will also present examples and discuss the dialogue of his previous collaborations with visual artists as well as bring in other examples of collaborations. The act of reading poems and other forms of writing and inviting artists to respond and engage with them can spark fresh ideas, challenging participants to think outside their usual artistic boundaries. The exchange between poetry (any form of heightened language) and visual art becomes a dialogue, one that fosters both personal and collective growth. The connection to John Yau’s decades-long collaborations with visual artists further deepens the workshop’s value. 

The title of this Symposia! is taken from John’s traveling exhibition most recently at the Schneider Museum in Ashland, OR, highlighting the richness of this ongoing collaboration, showing the ways in which poetry can act as a form of artistic dialogue rather than just an external influence. This Symposia! is a unique exploration of the intersection between poetry and visual art. By focusing on the symbiotic relationship between these two mediums, participants are encouraged to transform the experience of poems, anchored in language, into visual works. The workshop’s emphasis on reaction and translation is an invitation for visual artists to push the boundaries of their creative practices, using poetry not just as inspiration but as a tool for meaningful process. 

Interview with John Yau about his exhibition on five decades of collaborations with visual artists: https://hyperallergic.com/904269/john-yau-talks-about-the-art-of-collaboration/ 

About John Yau:
Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. Since his first book of poetry, Crossing Canal Street (1976), he has won acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. His poems frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, anchored in the legacy of his dual heritages as Chinese, American, poet, and artist, and his work often explores, and exploits, the boundaries between poetry and prose. 

A noted art critic and curator, Yau has also published an immense amount of works of art criticism and artists’ books. He was the Arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail until 2011 and has since then contributed regularly to Hyperallergic. 

Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. 

He has received honors, awards and fellowships for his work such as the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, to name a few, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. 

In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism.