Ferlinghetti was recently interviewed about his life as a poet, artist and activist, telling the story of City Lights, and of his first love, Normandy and Nagasaki, “the monster” that is the sea — as expressed in his visual art and his new exhibit Cross Pollination at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.
Cross-Pollination: The Art of Lawrence Ferlinghetti is guest curated by Diane Roby, an artist and curator who for several years has catalogued Ferlinghetti’s visual art at his Hunter’s Point studio in San Francisco. For this exhibition, she looks especially at the overlap of word and image as Ferlinghetti addresses recurring thematic material. “In Ferlinghetti’s art,” says Roby, “words give rise to image-making, and word and image meld in paint. The poet and painter, with pen and brush, turns his attention to his world of words and paint as he ponders questions of human existence and aspirations.”
