Buzz Spector Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28

Buzz Spector will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28.

Also featured will be Eileen G'Sell and another reader still to be determined.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Click here to sign-up via e-mail.

Buzz Spector was born in Chicago and was educated at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and then the University of Chicago, where he received the master of fine arts. Internationally recognized as an artist and critic, his work has been exhibited in museums throughout the United States and Europe, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Mattress Factory Art Museum (Pittsburgh), and the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art (Prato, Italy).

Buzz is also a highly accomplished teacher who received the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art Award in 2013. Having taught previously at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he is currently Professor of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

The subject matter of Buzz’s art typically involves an exploration of the idea of the book, the text, and the individual experience of perception through wide-ranging media including sculpture, photography, the artists’ book, printmaking, and installation. In 2012 Sara Ranchouse Publishing issued Buzzwords, a collection of new page art and interviews with Spector spanning thirty years of his work and ideas.

Thread

for Ann Hamilton

Action’s auspices, to band or
Braid a chain of events;
Gossamer filaments of this story or that
Lanyard, holding the line,
Passing through in
Procession, a ribbon of events in a
Row, of greatening
Scale or sequence;
Set the track for
Trains of thought to travel
A way.

-- Buzz Spector

Eileen G'Sell Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28

Eileen G'Sell will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, September 28.

Also featured will be Buzz Spector and another reader still to be determined.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Click here to sign-up via e-mail.

Eileen G'Sell's nonfiction and poetry have been published in Salon, the Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Conduit, Ninth Letter, and other journals. Her chapbook Portrait of My Ex with Giant Burrito is available from BOAAT Press. Since 2004, Eileen has mentored with Mentor St. Louis, now a division of Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club. She teaches writing and film at Washington University in St. Louis.

Portrait of My Ex with Giant Burrito

Men have died for less, and I, for one, never asked for more. In the Pacific Northwest are a thousand restaurants, healthy girls, and slutty food. Trees that shade new money humbly greet you on the interstate; intricate tattoos peek from sturdy cotton sleeves. “I consume five thousand calories a day,” he said the day he met me. We spoke about weddings and Sly Stallone; we ranked our favorite dogs by breed. In the morning he kissed my forehead before leaving me for hashbrowns. But he didn’t. Or he couldn’t. And the trees never changed a thing. “Endings are my expertise,” I whisper to the ushers. They are bored with their professions. They are picketing our aisle. In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” It was the first—and best—joke ever told.

-- Eileen G'Sell