Children of Grass
A Portrait of American Poetry
Photographs by B.A. Van Sise
“At its core, a photograph is not the person; like a poem, it is the reflection of that person’s light.”
— B.A. Van Sise
Children of Grass at Woody Guthrie Center, 2024
Children of Grass at Woody Guthrie Center, 2024
Children of Grass at Woody Guthrie Center, 2024
Joan Naviyuk Kane, Give or Take a Century, 2017
Mark Doty, Deep Lane, 2017
Rita Dove, Demeter's Prayers to Hades, 2016
Meg Day, Elegy in Translation, 2018
Danez Smith, king the color of space/tower of molasses & marrow, 2017
Joseph O. Legaspi, Imago, 2018
Joyce Carol Oates, Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money, 2018
Whether it's catching the right light and angle or penning the right word or phrase, the diversity of voices and craft in Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry offers a new understanding of what it means to be an American in the 21st-century.
Displayed alongside the poems by new and established contemporary poets, B.A. Van Sise's Children of Grass presents an anthology of photographic portraits paying tribute to the poets of today. These magical, inspired, and sometimes subversive photographs, created in collaboration with the subjects and designed as visual riffs on their poetry, not only epitomize the intriguing symbiosis between the two mediums but also ground us in the humanity of storytelling and self-expression.
Many of the most renowned poets working today are included in the exhibition. Literary revolutionaries like Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Nikki Giovanni, Joy Harjo, X.J. Kennedy, Patricia Smith, Ted Kooser, and Joyce Carol Oates are featured as well as the current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and other new artists including Joseph O. Legaspi, Meg Day, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Nicole Sealey, Danez Smith, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and Javier Zamora.
The exhibition provides opportunities for educational programming on numerous subjects, including the intersections between visual art and literature, poetry and its practice, and issues of class, privilege, racial and ethnic identity, as well as the meaning and importance of different forms of communication and art.
WORKS
50 photographs and 1 digital video
DIMENSIONS
16 x 24 in (41 x 61 cm)
SPACE REQUIREMENTS
150 linear feet (46 linear meters)
INQUIRIES
exhibitions@curatorial.org | 626.577.0044
FEE
Please inquire.
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE
Marion Art Gallery, SUNY-Fredonia | Fredonia, New York
(February 24 – April 19, 2026)
Woody Guthrie Center® | Tulsa, Oklahoma
(January 30 – May 7, 2024)
Photo by Veronica J. Lancaster
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
A frequent contributor to the Village Voice and BuzzFeed, B.A. Van Sise is also one of the world’s busiest travel photographers. His work as both a photographer and author has previously appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Mirror of London, and approximately 250 other publications, in addition to exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Center for Creative Photography, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a graduate of the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop and a National Press Photographer’s Association award-winner. A number of his portraits from the Children of Grass project are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian.
On the occasion of announcing the new traveling exhibition, Curatorial sat down with B.A. Van Sise to discuss the inspiration behind the Children of Grass series, the experience of creating visual poems of contemporary poets, and how the two mediums, in particular, improve our understanding of what it means to be an American today.
“Children of Grass is an enriching and visually stimulating anthology that will enchant and win over lovers of both poetry and photography.
There is wit and glimmer and ironic smirk in the photographs of B.A. Van Sise.”
— F-Stop Magazine
Display preview:
“Allowables” from Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid
©2013 by Nikki Giovanni
