Poetry Workshop with Marcus Zilliox

"Natural Land Cultural Space: Visualizing Voice in Spacetime"

Examining how language shapes our visual realm, this workshop focuses on developing a "visual voice" through poetry. There is a close relationship between Visual and Verbal Arts—language and poetry heighten our perception and understanding. This workshop will explore the Ekphrastic poems of New England Poet Anne Sexton, and the Puerto Rican Poet William Carlos Williams and his role in the Literary Movement Imagism. Using the exhibition The Land Carries Our Ancestors, participants will generate their own poem using ekphrasis and imagism as poetry generation frames.

Marcus Zilliox was born in 1972 in Phoenix of Native American and Mexican American descent. Grew up Gila River Indian Community, Arizona, and Phoenix, Arizona. Zilliox earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing at Arizona State University in 1996. Zilliox earned a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking at Yale in 2007. He has exhibited his work in the Southwest, California, New England, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. In 2002, he received Community Scholar fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Solo exhibitions include Hispanic Research Center at Arizona State University, the David Rockefeller Center for Latino Studies at Harvard, and Museo Chicano in Phoenix. Zilliox exhibited in Another Arizona at the Nelson Fine Arts Museum, Arizona Biennial '01 at Tucson Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Art in Odd Places. Currently resides in New England where he lives and works in Connecticut and New York City with wife and fellow artist Tlisza Jaurique.