BOSTON, MA.- The Boston Athenĉum presents “PAINTER + POET: George Nama and Charles Simic” Feb. 10 through April 10, 2010, in the Athenĉum’s Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery, located at 10 ½ Beacon Street on Beacon Hill near the State House.

This new exhibition, the result of a collaboration that began several years ago between the two artists, features a selection of Nama’s recent etchings, sculptures, gouaches, and artist’s books that have been inspired by and give visual illumination to Simic’s poetry. It is curated by David Dearinger, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings and Sculpture.

George Nama is a New York artist who specializes in expressive abstracted figures, rendered in a variety of media, that interpret the works of major writers such as Simic, Yves Bonnefoy, and Alfred Brendel. His first one-artist exhibition was held at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 1963; since that time he has had shows at Shepherd & Derom Galleries in New York, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles, and in galleries in Brussels, Munich, Vevey, and Paris, among others. His works are in major institutions, including the Boston Athenĉum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and Yale University Art Gallery. Nama’s versatility and generosity have made him the perfect mentor to and teacher of new generations of artists. For many years, he was on the faculty of the School of the National Academy of Design in New York. He lives in Long Island, New York.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He has been honored with a Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 1967 he has published numerous collections of poems, the latest of which, That Little Something, was released in spring 2008. A collection entitled Sixty Poems was published in honor of his appointment as United States Poet Laureate. He has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano (2006), and has translated the works of Yugoslavian poets such as Ivan Lalic, Vasko Popa, Tomasz Salamun and Aleksandar Ristovic. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the poetry editor of The Paris Review. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire.