April – Ars Poetica – Exhibition – Rime and Color — Part 2

Before a single brushstroke touched canvas, these poems were already painting pictures in artists’ minds—here’s the collection that inspired it all.

There’s a particular magic in the moment when a poet’s words find their way into an artist’s hands. The poems selected for the 2025-2026 Ars Poetica collection—curated with care and vision by Tamarah Rockwood—are exactly the kind of verses that demand visual translation. They’re the poems that linger in your chest, that create images so vivid you can almost see them taking form. This April, at JG Art Gallery + Events, that almost becomes real.

What Makes These Poems Resonate

The Ars Poetica collection represents the best of Kitsap County’s poetic voice. These aren’t poems written in isolation—they’re voices that speak to our shared experience while honoring deeply personal truths. What makes them particularly suited to visual interpretation is their inherent imagery. Whether through metaphor, sensory detail, or emotional landscape, each selected poem offers an artist something to hold onto, something to translate into color, form, and composition.

Tamarah Rockwood’s curation process is about finding resonance. She looks for poems that don’t just describe experience—they *create* it. The poems that found their way into this year’s collection are ones that seemed to reach out of the page, almost asking to be seen from another angle, through another medium. Some are tender and intimate. Others are bold and questioning. All of them carry the kind of truth that speaks across the boundary between words and images.

The Themes That Demanded Paint

When you read through the Ars Poetica collection, certain currents emerge. There’s a throughline of memory running through many of the selections—how we hold onto moments, how the past shapes the present. You’ll find poems that wrestle with identity and belonging, that question what we owe to one another, that celebrate resilience in quiet and powerful ways. These are themes that poets know well, but themes that visual artists recognize too. They’re the universal human experiences that transcend medium and language.

What’s particularly compelling about this year’s collection is how the poems invite interpretation rather than demanding it. A poet writes one truth; an artist sees another. Neither is wrong. That’s the beauty of this exhibition—it honors the original poem while making space for something entirely new to emerge. The artists featured at JG aren’t illustrating these poems. They’re having a conversation with them, answering back with color and form and their own creative vision.

A Preview of What’s Coming

Come April 3rd, when you walk through our doors for the First Friday Art Walk opening reception, you’ll encounter work that represents months of creative wrestling. These artists sat with these poems. They lived with them. They asked themselves hard questions about what the words meant to them personally, how they could honor the poet’s vision while making something entirely their own.

The poems you’ll see referenced in the exhibition speak to the heart of what it means to be human. They’re Kitsap County voices—grounded, authentic, unafraid of depth. And the visual art responding to them? That’s where the real magic happens.

If you’re curious about the poems before the opening, we encourage you to seek out the Ars Poetica collection. Let the words work on you. Then come see how our local artists have let those words work on *them*. It’s a rare opportunity to witness creative translation at its most honest and moving.

**Join us Friday, April 3rd at 6 PM for the opening reception during the Bainbridge Island First Friday Art Walk. Or return Saturday, April 11th at 1 PM for our intimate Poetry Reading—hearing these verses aloud from the poets themselves changes everything.**

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*This is Part 2 of our 5-part series: April – Ars Poetica – Exhibition – Rime and Color*