Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Ashbery was on hand at Rider University on November 6 to kick off Leland Bell: Works from the 1950s – 1991, a nationwide traveling art exhibition.
             Ashbery, art critic and friend to the deceased Bell, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1975 book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, spoke of the painter’s work, which was on display in the Student Center Art Gallery, but also read poems from his latest book of poetry Your Name Here (2001).
             “It is nice to see Bell’s paintings displayed together in this beautifully arranged venue.  He was a talented Imagist painter in a time where Imagist paintings were unfortunately ignored,” Ashbery explained.
             The free exhibition, which marks the first time these works by Bell have been housed in one place, runs until December 11 from 5 to 7 pm and began in The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College and in the List Gallery at Swarthmore College, both Pennsylvanian schools.
             However, the exhibit, which is currently making its New Jersey debut, traveled to Rider thanks to a grant from the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission/New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State.
             Professor of Art Deborah Rosenthal, who invited Ashbery, felt that the Pulitzer Prize winner’s poetry perfectly complemented Bell’s paintings.
             “John Ashbery… is a poet who always seems to connect with painters.  I think… painters as well as… poets and prose writers are glad when the barriers between those worlds become permeable, as they certainly do in the poetry and criticism of John Ashbery,” she said.
             Art critic Jed Perl, who was invited to introduce Ashbery to the Rider community during the exhibition, concluded his speech by explaining how the combination of the two artists’ work exemplify artistic expression with their complementary, yet individualistic, passions.
             “There is a firey individuality to the works that both these men have done, but that fireyness is presented with a certain coolness.  You feel that there is passion and eccentricity, something wonderfully peculiar about the world these men know,” Perl stated.  “They subject the ordinary to extreme formal transformation and then suggest their allegiance not only to their personal other condition, but also to the otherness that is at the core of all art.”