Ann Lauterbach Artist's Talk

Ann Lauterbach, a prolific and accomplished poet and author, has frequently engaged with the visual arts throughout her career. Since 1991, she has been cochair of the writing program at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

A 1993 MacArthur fellow, she also has been an artist/critic in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Her most recent book, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, was published by Viking in 2005. During her time at Ohio State, Lauterbach will be working in our Art & Tech studios on a new media project.

Born in Manhattan, Lauterbach studied painting at the High School of Music and Art, earned her undergraduate degree in English from the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and attended Columbia University Graduate School on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She spent seven years in London, working as an editor, arts administrator, and teacher. Her early poems were published in little magazines in England, where, as curator of the literature program at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, she met many artists and writers, including Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, R. B. Kitaj, John Cage, Jim Dine, Ron Padgett, and John Ashbery.

Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she worked in art galleries, wrote art criticism, and continued to publish poems. Her first collection, Many Times, But Then was published in 1979 by Texas University Press, followed by Before Recollection (Princeton, 1986). Her next five collections, Clamor (1991), And For Example (1994), On a Stair (1997), If in Time : Selected Poems 1975–2000 (2001), and Hum (2005) were published by Viking-Penguin. She has written on many artists, including Gerhard Richter, Edward Hopper, David Smith, and Ann Hamilton. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from Ingram Merrill and the New York Council for the Arts. She has been a contributing editor of Conjunctions magazine since 1981.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Department of Art and the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English.