The work for this exhibition is the result of a collaboration between critically acclaimed Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco (City of a Hundred Fires, Directions to the Beach of the Dead) and painter and printmaker John Bailly, Fellow of the Honors College at Florida International University. Bailly’s work for this project consists of prints, paintings, and book art created in dialogue with Blanco’s poems, which will be printed and mounted for the exhibition. Often subtle, sometimes vague, and rarely obvious, the relationships between the poems and paintings will rely on the viewer’s own intuition and associations.

Blanco Bailly

In her exhibition essay This Tropic of Resemblances, Melanie Almeder writes,

"There are experiences that, on the surface, seem to have nothing to do with each other. What would the troop movements in World War II have to do with the street energy of Little Havana, or with clouds, or with the words of a dying father? But when poet Richard Blanco and artist John Bailly collaborated to make this exhibition by setting their work into conversation, the maps early explorers made began to echo with the bright red "U" of the atomic bombs, to echo with the lattice of street maps and with cloud drift--even “Quantum Theory” resembles a love letter, resembles the state of exile."

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The poems of Richard Blanco

The paintings of John Bailly

The essays of Melanie Almeder

Bios & Contact

Exhibition details and calendar of events

Richard Blanco *** Place of Mind *** John Bailly