CENTERFOLD
ARTISTS ARTISTS ++ POETS POETS
COLLABORATE IN COLUMBIA
BROADS
PROJECT pHot os by J onAt H An sHA r p e 30
“Getting 40 people to work together is a bit of a logistical nightmare,” laughs Darien Cavanaugh, coordinator for the Columbia Broadside Project, an ambitious venture pairing South Carolina writers and artists in collaborative projects. But if all goes as planned, the Columbia Broadside Project show will open at Tapp’s Art Center on January 17, with an impressive range of original and collaborative writing and art—a type of collaboration, Cavanaugh says, that we haven’t seen here before. Cavanaugh has long been a fan of broadsides—large letterpress printings of poems, often with original art. Poetry broadsides were popular in the 1960s and 1970s, he says, and
recently a few small and art presses have begun to revive interest in the genre. For him, it’s the connection of visual and verbal arts that works, the combination of poem and image. “I know that for me, poem and image impact me differently together than either would on their own.” As an editor of USC’s creative writing journal Yemassee for three years while a student in the MFA program, Cavanaugh says he had wanted to sponsor an annual broadside contest through the journal, but he graduated before he could make that happen. He had in mind the poetry broadsides produced by Oneiros Press of Chicago, which have featured the work of major modern poets combined