Art, poetry converse in Northwind show

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, March 17, 2026

PORT TOWNSEND — Mixed media, collage, watercolor and poetry will all talk to one another in a special exhibition opening this week at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery, 701 Water St., Port Townsend.

“Ars Poetica,” highlighting 11 pairings of poetry and visual art, springs from the Northwind Art “Paint from Poems” class taught by Meg Kaczyk in February.

The gallery show will run from Thursday through May 4 and have two celebrations. The opening party will be from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. April 4 during the First Saturday Art Walk, and a poetry reading will be conducted at 3 p.m. April 25.

“Admission is free and the public is invited to everything,” Northwind spokesperson Diane Urbani said, noting that this is the second annual “Ars Poetica” exhibit in the nonprofit gallery.

“Ars Poetica,” whose title comes from a Latin term for “the art of poetry,” will run concurrently with “New Work by Randy Sturgis and Peter Koronakos.” Both are conversations between different ways of expression, Urbani said.

The Ars Poetica Washington program, now in its 13th year, curates poems from hundreds of submissions and makes the selected ones available to artists on their website at www.arspoeticawa.com. Visual artists around the state then choose a poem that resonates for them and create art inspired by it. Then they have the opportunity to exhibit their work at an Ars Poetica-sponsoring gallery.

Northwind Art’s “Paint from Poems” artists in the show include Cezanne Alexander, Susan Berry, Diana Dauble, Jaime Duyck, Angela Howard, Amy King, Andrea Mercado, Merilee Nyland, Meghan Peterson, Terri Tyler and Debra Yoshimura.

“Their pieces are wildly different from one another,” said Urbani, who added that the poetry is just as diverse.

The chosen poems include Matt Butler’s “Black Horse,” Tia Hudson’s “Haute Couture,” Stephen Ullom’s “Haiku I” and Judith Duncan’s “Star Blizzard.”

Some of the artists also are poets. Kaczyk wrote a piece titled “Anchor,” which Berry responded to with her vivid mixed-media work. Nyland wrote the poem “Red” that sparked Duyck’s pen and watercolor painting.

“The visual pieces really honor the mystery and magic of poetry,” Urbani said, “and the exhibit shows us new ways of seeing the two art forms.”