Museum to pair wine with ‘S.S. Vallejo’

Wine and art: Now that's a ‘Ship of Dreams'...|

Two upcoming events are inspired by the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Ship of Dreams: Artists, Poets and Visionaries of the S.S. Vallejo.”

Gerd Stern, Beat poet and media artist, will speak with biographer and poet Neeli Cherkovski, on Saturday, May 19, at 3 p.m.

Stern is best known as a poet and media artist. He has several published books of poems, and his oral history, “From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist 1948-1978,” was published by the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley in 1996. Californians remember Stern as a member of the Beat poetry and art scene in San Francisco and Marin in the 1950s, living on a barge next to the S.S. Vallejo in the Sausalito houseboat community. Upon moving to New York in the 1960s, Stern co-founded the arts/technology cooperative USCO, whose work was featured in the Walker Arts Center’s recent exhibition “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,” which toured museums throughout the country in 2016. Stern was also an early member of the Reality Club, president of the public company Intermedia Systems Corporation, and served as a consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation arts program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Cherkovski is the author of many books of poetry, and he is the author of biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski for the Poetry Foundation, as well as the critical memoir “Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets” (1988). His papers are held at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Cherkovski received the 2017 Jack Mueller Poetry Prize awarded at the Jack Mueller Festival in Fruita, Colorado.

Tickets to the event are $10 SVMA members, $16 general.

From 4 to 6 p.m. on Sunday, May 20, SVMA will host “Pairings: Art and Wine and Poetry.” The museum’s latest pairings event is a celebration of the Bay Area’s contributions to poetry and art in the 1950s and ‘60s, combined with some of Sonoma Valley’s more recent contributions to the winemaker’s art. Gloria Ferrer, Dane Cellars, En Garde Winery, and Once & Future are pouring. Pairings: Art and Wine and Poetry will include award-winning poet Brenda Hillman and National Poetry Slam finalist Jason Bayani, and will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. Poets Tess Taylor and Hollie Hardy curated and will host the event. Reservations for both events are recommended and may be made at svma.org/calendar, or at 939-7862.

“We are so excited and honored that “Flight of Poets,” has found a home at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art,” said Tess Taylor at the most recent pairings event at SVMA last fall.

Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and documents, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. The author of over 10 books of poetry, Hillman, 67, has received numerous awards for her work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award.

Bayani is a a veteran of the National Poetry Slam scene whose work has been widely published.

At the Pairings event on May 20, Gerd Stern will also present “Seven Stray Cats Reading Their Poems,” originally published in 1957.

Tickets to the event are $20 SVMA members, $35 general.

The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art is located at 551 Broadway. Regular Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is $10 for adults ($7 for Sonoma residents). Children 12 and under are admitted free, as are SVMA members.

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