We have been thinking very much about how to create an atmosphere of inclusion in our presentations of art so that the visitors will not only look at art but also interact with it. We really do feel that art is a language just like any other that can be used to communicate almost anything. How can we link the idea of a written or printed system to that of a visual artistic language?

That is the question that guided us as we conceived this show. We selected artworks that relate to writing, text, or just the idea of putting thoughts onto a surface like paper. And based on these visual references, we created very simple poems , following three basic rules: 1) the first line should have the word “page/s”, 2) the last line should end with “between the lines”, and 3) the syllabic count for the four lines should be 7/7/7/6.

In spite of the rules, the poems are not rigid or sophisticated. Playful, more than profound. Our intention was to create a game that any visitor can play if they want to. With a copy of the poems and a list of the art works, the game is to guess which art work corresponds to each poem. Along with a small library of related books and catalogs, brief texts on each work have been compiled to serve as clues as they add a bit of insight on them. And finally, one last art work, Ugo Rondinone’s “lines out to silence” remains without a poem as an invitation to each viewer to write a poem that will relate to that work. Some poem-art matches will be easier to guess than others, but we hope that the ones that are more difficult will inspire people to ask questions and read about the works with greater intensity.