On July 20, in the newly reinstalled contemporary galleries at the Art Institute, Evanston resident Christina Pugh responded to works with poems and readings in the Poetry Foundation’s Pop-Up Poetry series.
Ms. Pugh said “I chose Mark Rothko’s ‘Untitled (Purple, White and Red)’ and Jackson Pollack’s ‘Number 17A’ because I had a longstanding fascination with their work and had written poems on those topics quite a few years ago. The Gerhard Richter painting, ‘Davos,’ seemed to dovetail with a recent poem I’d written about light in the universe.”
Ms. Pugh, professor of English in the program of writers at University of Illinois at Chicago, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative arts for 2015 and spent her winter residency in 2016 at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy.
As a Guggenheim fellow, Ms. Pugh worked on a book, “Stardust Media,” a collection of reflective poems that follow a poetic speaker through encounters with various technologies – both ancient and contemporary.