Past Exhibitions

The Poetry Foundation’s presentation of Kara Walker: Back of Hand appropriately foregrounds Walker’s long-term engagement with language and text. 

This exhibition is a biographical sketch of Harriet Monroe, founding editor of Poetry magazine.

This exhibition showcases collaborations between Poetry magazine guest editors and cover artists during a period of remarkable growth at the Poetry Foundation.

Painter Alex Katz’s extensive collaborations with poets are the subject of this exhibition, the very first to bring together the full range of materials that showcase these connections.

Diana Solís: Encuentros showcases photographs by queer Mexicana Chicana feminist artist Diana Solís, documenting poetry communities in Chicago—including the Guild Complex, La Decima Musa, Weeds, and Hothouse—throughout the 1970s–1990s.

Planetaria is an exhibition of visual poems by Monica Ong that playfully takes poetry off the page as handheld volvelles, poetry broadsides, and installations, imagining the sky from a female...

This installation, created by artist and designer Bob Faust, rejoices in the poems of Patricia Smith and invites you to recall our connectedness and partake in healing. Smith, who was raised...

Jun Fujita: American Visionary, copresented with the Newberry Library, focuses on the extraordinary accomplishments of poet and photojournalist Jun Fujita. This exhibition is an expanded version of Jun Fujita: Oblivion,...

Well known as one of the most gifted and prolific poets of the modern era, A.R. (Archie Randolph) Ammons was also an abundant painter. A.R. Ammons: Watercolors focuses on Ammons’s...

Morden Tower, now one of Britain’s literary landmarks, was once a dusty, near-derelict medieval turret without plumbing or electricity. That changed on Bloomsday 1964 when Tom and Connie Pickard began...

As artist and curator Jon Hendricks describes, “Yoko Ono typed up for George Maciunas the suggested contents of what was to become Grapefruit.  A facsimile of the entire typescript is...

In a world saturated by digital media, The Lushness of Print revisits the beauty of the printed word. The Lushness of Print presents the ekphrastic partnership between poet Samiya Bashir and printer Daniela del Mar. 

“… to take root among the stars.” is a speculative “mapping” project wherein evidence of Afrofuturist and AfroSurrealist thought is traced, imagined, and archived in and on handmade paper.

Step inside the poem “On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens” by Khaty Xiong. This interactive exhibit presents a visualization of Xiong’s poem about visiting a garden to...

Elizabeth Kray (1916–1987) was a visionary arts administrator and imaginative inventor of poetry programs and initiatives. Before founding Poets House, the poetry library and literary center located in New York...

This exhibition highlights the work and life of poet and artist Ava Kadishson Schieber. Kadishson Schieber was born Jewish in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, in 1926 and survived the Shoah in...

For this exhibition, Chicago poets, artists, and organizing communities were invited to contribute signs of resistance:  posters, banners, and other ephemera of direct action in response to social unrest. The resulting...

In celebration of the hundredth birthday of Gwendolyn E. Brooks (1917 – 2000), Illinois Poet Laureate and the first Black winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tyrue “Slang” Jones painted the...

This exhibition showcases highlights from the literary archives of Gwendolyn E. Brooks (1917–2000), Illinois Poet Laureate and the first black winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks’s papers include youthful poetry...

This exhibition presents photographs and ephemera from the poet Jun Fujita (1888-1963). Fujita is an English-language tanka poet who published regularly in Poetry during the 1920s. The first Japanese-American photojournalist, he is...