S.U.N.Y. at Oswego Professor Emeritus of Art George O'Connell and his colleague Lewis Turco collaborated for for more than a quarter century, issuing annual Xmas cards which are a part of the Smithsonian Institution's archive of American art, including “The Falcon Carol” (13219) and one other that may be viewed on-line, that were combinations of poetry and printmaking. Their first joint project was on a book titled American Still Lifes by Lewis Turco, cover design and illustrations by George O’Connell, Oswego, NY: Mathom Publishing Company, 1981. ISBN 0930000177, signed, limited hardbound edition; 0930000187, paper, out-of-print, but signed copies are still available from the author @ $9.95 plus shipping.
The first exhibition in which O’Connell and Turco were partners was The New York Landscape, "Poems by twenty State University of New York poets, with visual responses by twenty State University of New York artists." Their contribution consisted of "Millpond," a broadside poem by Lewis Turco printed in handset type on handmade paper by Buffalo Papers, together with "Dusk Light," an intaglio by George O'Connell. The exhibit was held in Albany at The Plaza Gallery, from 16 October through 30 November, 1981, and at the Pratt Manhattan Center Gallery, New York City, from 18 December, 1982, through 15 January, 1983, with a subsequent tour of New York State. The Catalog was edited by Peter Gordon for the Plaza Gallery.
This original pairing led to establishment of the Jeffrey Sisson Permanent Memorial Exhibit: "Millpond," in calligraphy by Jean Garvey, together with four prints by O'Connell, at the Aurelia Osburn Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta, New York, in 1982. Subsequently there was a Chancellor’s Reprise Exhibition of the original show in the South Tower of S.U.N.Y. Plaza during the Fall semester of 1994.
The collaborators had the opportunity in the spring of 1996 to mount a full-fledged gallery exhibition, with the assistance of an S.O.S. grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, at the Rathbone Gallery of Sage Junior College (now the Opalka Gallery) in Albany of Lewis Turco's sequence Bordello, A Portfolio of PoemPrints, issued in a five-copy limited edition portfolio of poems with images by George O'Connell, Oswego: Grey Heron Press / Mathom Press Enterprises, 1996, cased portfolio, O-P. All rights reserved. The image at the head of this posting is a photograph of the cover of the portfolio. This next image is of the title page, and the third is of the copyright page:
This fourth image is of the first poem in the portfolio, “Jonathan Hawkins”:
This thirty-five-line poem is written in the form of a ballade supreme. In the next several days the rest of the pages of Bordello will be mounted on this blog.
