In the shadow of ongoing ecological and political crises, artist Warren Linn and writer Paul Jaskunas have collaborated on a timely, provocative series of images and poems.

In 2022, the Warren Linn began to fill a new sketchbook’s pages with drawings in which contorted seaborn figures travel through darkness aboard precarious dinghies. Inspired by the manic energy of the images, Paul Jaskunas drafted several poems in response. Over the course of a year, the two friends embarked on an exchange of drawings and poems that soon grew to encompass a broader cross-section of work from Linn’s Baltimore studio.

 



The collaboration has culminated in Drawing Lessons (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing), a new hybrid book of art and poetry that is at once comic and disquieting, undeniably contemporary yet steeped in tradition. 

Jaskunas and Linn thank the MICA Office of Research and Faculty Grants Committee for supporting this project with a Marcella Brenner Grant. 

Paul Jaskunas, novelist and poet, is a professor of creative writing and literature at MICA and publisher of Full Bleed, a journal dedicated to the intersection of the visual and literary arts. He is the author of the novel Hidden, which won the Friends of American Writers Award,  The Atlas of Remedies (fiction, Stillhouse Press) and Mother Ship (poetry, Finishing Line Press).
 
Warren Linn, MICA Professor Emeritus, is a visual artist whose work has garnered numerous awards, as well as gallery and museum credits. He has exhibited nationally and internationally since the mid 1960s, and for fifty years, his editorial illustrations appeared in major print-media outlets throughout North America.

The exhibition is on view in the Pinkard Gallery (Bunting Center, Floor 1) from October 18 - December 6, 2024. 

Reception: Thursday, November 14th 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: 
Pinkard Gallery: Monday - Friday, 10AM - 5PM. 

Campus galleries are open to the public. Outside visitors can enter galleries after signing in at the front desk of the respective building.