Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica is now in its 13th year on Bainbridge Island — a program that asks visual artists to work from specific poems rather than from the world directly. The 2026 edition, titled Rime and Color, places JG artists in conversation with a juried selection of poems by Kitsap County poets, assembled and curated by Bainbridge poet Tamarah Rockwood.

The poems selected for this cycle share a consistent formal quality: they hold images rather than arguments. Memory, belonging, the texture of particular places, the specific weight of loss — these poems give painters something to look at rather than something to illustrate. The constraint is productive. An artist who works from a poem cannot fall back on observation alone; the subject has already been translated once, and the painter's task is a second translation that need not agree with the first.

The works in this exhibition are not illustrations. They are responses — which means the relationship between poem and painting is available to the viewer as a third act of interpretation. Bring the poem to the painting. See what moves.

The program was founded by Bainbridge Island poet Nancy Rekow, who passed away in 2023. It continues in her name.