WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.- The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents The Moon Is Broken: Photography from Poetry, Poetry from Photography. For this exhibition, regional poets curated photographs from the museum’s collection and wrote original poems, creating lyrical arrangements that explore how image and text resonate. The exhibition, and its accompanying interpretative programming, is an invitation to reconsider and respond to photography and poetry.

WCMA’s exhibitions this year celebrate the breadth of the museum’s holdings in honor of the publication of Encounter, the new handbook of the permanent collection. In addition to its staff curators, the museum has invited faculty, artists, students, and members of the community to reexamine the collection through a series of exhibitions that bring together works of art crossing cultures and time periods. “The curatorial process for ‘The Moon Is Broken’, like the new handbook to the collection, embodies our mission as a teaching museum—to encourage multiple voices from across the academic disciplines to engage with art, history, and ideas and to work in partnership on innovative approaches to presenting the extraordinarily diverse range of art in WCMA’s care,” says Director Lisa Corrin.

Under Corrin’s direction, the exhibition and programming took shape organically and collaboratively with input from all involved. She initially began working on the project this past summer with Williams undergraduate June Gordon, Class of 2008 and Cynthia Way, the museum’s new Director of Education and Visitor Experience.

Together, they reviewed the museum’s extensive photography collection and selected images that leave themselves open to poetic interpretation. In contrast to straight documentary photography that seeks to make declarative statements about events or pin down meaning, the selected images pose questions, evoke mystery, and create a puzzle for the eye. At turns abstract and ambiguous or descriptive and precise, these images endeavor to describe the essence of things in subtle and unexpected ways. Photographers featured in the exhibition range in style, intention, and time period, but all of their works share an evocation of the poetic. They include: Robert D’Allesandro, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michaels, Man Ray, Aaron Siskind, Bruce Weber, and Garry Winogrand, among others.

Interestingly, the title for this exhibition came from a four-year-old boy who looked up at a half moon in the sky and said to his mother, “The moon is broken.” Gordon then discovered a poem by D. H. Lawrence using the same phrase. Indeed, the selection of photographs reflects a strand throughout the history of photography—from early pictorial work to contemporary artwork—in which photographs are derived from poems, compared to poems, or described in poetic terms. In this case, they inspired poems. Conversations with Williams faculty, the poets Larry Raab and Cassandra Cleghorn, helped to define the process for engaging regional poets in the exhibition.

In August, WCMA began inviting poets living in the region to select a group of up to five images from this checklist to make their own “image poems” from the photographs. Unlike a museum curator who might group these photographs chronologically, according to artist or subject matter, the poets will have the freedom to arrange them according to their own “poetic logic.” Each poet-curator demonstrates a unique approach to responding to the visual art, making the evolution of the exhibition unpredictable and the results surprising. The poet-curators’ juxtapositions of these photographic works promote new interpretations based on the visual and textual relationships that they set forward. The poets will also write original poems this fall, which will later be integrated with the “image poems.” Poet-curators invited to participate in the project include Trudy Ames, April Bernard, Rachel Barenblat, Cassandra Cleghorn, D. L. Crockett-Smith, Peter Filkins, Larry Raab, Mary Ruefle, Barbara Tran, and John Yau.

“The exhibition and programming explore a poetic view of photography while celebrating the creative process itself,” says Way, who co-curated the exhibition and designed the interpretative programming.

The interpretative component will extend the museum’s reach into the community, drawing together community members to explore the connections between photography and poetry. Programs range from school tours and gallery talks to community partnerships and finally a literary reading in the gallery, but individual viewers are also encouraged to contribute poems in response to the unique artworks on exhibition. “The programs encourage viewers to respond—and to frame their responses in the mode of artistic expression in which the exhibition itself converses,” says Way.

A school tour program will engage students in discussing the exhibition and then creating Polaroid photographs and writing poems of their own. In a collaborative initiative, Inkberry in North Adams will offer youth and adult writing courses that use the exhibition at the center of an exploration of ecphrastic writing, or writing that focuses on art. On Sunday April 29, the museum will host a literary reading with the contributing poets in the gallery, providing an opportunity for the general public and program participants to meet the poet-curators and celebrate the power of word and image.

The exhibition will through July 8, 2007. The visual “image poems” will be installed for the November opening, with original poetry appearing as it is completed this fall, allowing for viewers to consider the differences in meaning that arise when text comes into the picture.