Artist/Poet Gerd Stern will be the featured reader for the “Thursdays Are for Poetry Reading” (held on the third Thursday every month) at the Teaneck General Store on Thursday, June 12.
Gerd Stern is a poet and multimedia artist who has published several books of poetry including First Poems and Others (1952), Afterimage (1965), a serigraphed selection with drawings by David Weinrib entitled Conch Tales (1984), and a chap book, Fragmeants (2002). His oral history was published by the University of California (ROHO) Berkeley in 2002 and is available online and in hard cover.
A founder of the 1960s media arts collaborative USCO, Stern’s first show of electronic sculptures and collages was at Allen Stone Gallery in 1962. In 1963, his one-person exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art featured a first multi-media performance, “Who R U & What’s Happening,” which was also performed at the University of British Columbia with a lecture by media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, with whom Stern was associated for a number of years.
Stern taught communications and media at Harvard University’s School of Education and at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus in the 1970s. He acted as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Art Program, and was for many years a panel member in video and film for the New York State Council on the Arts. He consulted and produced for the National Endowment on the Arts and was a director of Planning Corporation for the Arts, a trustee of America the Beautiful Fund, and chairperson of the Woodstock Artists Association.
Since 2007, Stern and Judith Sokoloff, the long-term editor of Na’Amat Woman Magazine, have been assembling work from Israel, the United States, and globally for an anthology titled, Hag Sameach Poems for the Jewish Holidays. To date, they have collected several hundred poems from contemporary and traditional sources.
During the past few years Stern was artist-in-residence for DAAD in Berlin, Germany and at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. He read poems and exhibited collages at the DAAD gallery, the Thiess gallery in Munich, the Bemis Center, and the Omaha Library. His work was also exhibited at the Ramapo College galleries in New Jersey.
Recent readings of Stern’s Await and Aware, with guitar by Paul Gregory, took place at New York City’s “The Stone,” as well as a presentation of video effects transformations, “Moires on Moires,” at New York City’s Optosonic Tea series. A libretto for the opera on the psychedelic era, Psyche and Delia, is in process with collaborator Ed Rosenfeld and composer Mark Moebius. A cycle of poems, Statemeants, was also read at the Woodstock Museum, New York.
Gerd Stern was an artist-in-residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice in the summer of 2010 where he wrote a series of Venetian Cantos poemlets, word collaged bilingually eight Carneval masks in English and Italian and videoed wall, pavement, and door fragments, which he is editing with a San Paolo Basilica church bell sound. He is also working toward the publication of four edited CDs of 1973 interviews he recorded with Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers and is preparing a manuscript of unpublished poems from the past two decades.
In January of 2011 Gerd was invited to jury for the Ernesto de Sousa Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, where he also performed at zdb with Katherine Liberovskya and Phill Niblock and read and sang at Bar Muv. New Yorker Kunst Geschichten (2011) by Kat Schuetz and published by Verlag fuer Moderne Kunst, Nuernberg, includes a 25-page chapter about Gerd and his work.
An exhibition of Gerd’s collage poetry and a series of silkscreened poems with brush work by Thea Herold, “Into the Mind Fire,” opened at NYU’s Deutsches House Gallery in December of 2011. More recently he lectured at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; participated in a McLuhan conference at the University of Pennsylvania; and installed USCO work at Seville’s Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (July 2012).
Please join us for a poetic evening and take part in our “Open Mic” part of the program.
For more information, please contact: Bruce Prince, at 201-530-5046, or online at
[email protected]. Teaneck General Store, 502a Cedar Lane, Teaneck, NJ 07666.
