Kirkwood Community College professor Arbe Bareis Moyaad and professor emeritus Marianne Taylor have a gallery on display at Kirkwood Community College now through Sept. 20.
Taylor will be returning to Mount Vernon Tuesday, Sept. 13, for an artist’s reception to be held from 5-6 p.m.
Taylor, the former Mount Vernon poet laureate and resident, now resides on the west coast and works as a sales manager at Powell’s Books. She continues to teach a few online classes at Kirkwood as well.
Taylor said that the collaboration with Moyaad began from mutual admiration of one another’s works.
“I remember writing about how I liked one of Moyaad’s paintings, and he said he appreciated some of my poetry as well,” Taylor said. “We were in contact after that about doing a collaboration of poetry and paintings for a gallery.”
In a video promoting the work for the gallery, Moyaad said his concept with the project was not on which was better – art or literature – but on how the two can collaborate with one another.
Combined, the duo created more than 46 paired poems and paintings, several of which are now on display at Iowa Hall at Kirkwood in a free-to-the public exhibit.
Taylor said the collaboration was something she has always tried to do with other professors and model for her students.
The duo’s work was impacted because of the pandemic, but they found ways to collaborate on pieces.
“Sometimes it was reading the same book and then letting that book be the subject for both of our pieces as to what the art was,” Taylor said. “Others, it was me providing a poem and letting Arbe come up with the artwork to accompany the piece, or myself coming up with a poem to accompany one of Arbe’s paintings.”
One of the writing exercises she has had students conduct during creative writing assignments was to go into the gallery and pick a painting that spoke to them to write a piece about it.
“It’s one of those instances where an existing work can inspire creativity from another artist,” Taylor said. “It was very interesting to do that work myself and find how I connected and what my response would be.”
Taylor said one of the things she definitely enjoyed was the challenging aspect of the project, as well as the way the project pushed her outside of her own comfort zones.
“Having deadlines that I had to meet was also a lot of fun,” Taylor said. “Sometimes without those deadlines, a creative project may not be kept up with. I found I had to get better at sticking with the deadlines to work with my collaborator for both of our sakes.”
She also loves that this gives her a larger connection with Kirkwood, even in her retirement.
“It’s nice to have this continued connection to a place I worked for so long,” Taylor said. “It’s also nice as an artist to be able to live on the west coast and still have connections with my friends and colleagues in the Midwest.”
Taylor is looking forward to seeing people she knows from Mount Vernon and other communities at the reception as well.
A sampling of some of the poems and pieces of artwork, as well as more discussion from Moyaad and Taylor on the collaboration can be found at: https://youtu.be/PeTuZVw7sbk