46
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
FINALIST, 2014 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY MARYLIN HERVIEUX
is an abstract lightly brushed across an involution. Imagine the utter plenty packed in, observables observed before they’re discernible. Distance is an open-windowed draft with no known beginning; an evanescence of hardness and definition, whether of heart or tree; dream-dust and fog and cashmere rain; the descending shades of longing. It’s a street band long after the parade, trumpet and drum-speak in some obscure adjournment. Distance is an echo, sometimes blue, sometimes the color of elderly. You can’t put your mind in it nor pull it away. It’s like a lake’s snug mist where stepping through could swallow you.
COURTESY OF ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM, BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLECTION; GIFT OF THE FALCON CHARITABLE FOUNDATION
Distance
Blue (Oil on linen, 34x40) by Joseph Fiore, 1952
JOSEPH FIORE (1925–2008) was born in Cleveland, OH. He moved to North Carolina in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky, and in 1949 was asked to join the art faculty, where he remained until the college closed in 1957. He returned to New York City and became a member of the 10th Street Art Scene, prominent in the 1950s and ’60s. His art has been exhibited widely and is in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Academy in New York, the Black Mountain College Museum, and the Asheville Art Museum. His numerous awards include the Andrew Carnegie Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001. See more of his work in the Asheville Art Museum.