When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the parishes of New Orleans, Louisiana in 2005, approximately 150,000 residents declined to heed the evacuation orders, instead deciding to ride out the risk. Riding out the risk, as a hurricane term, implies an active awareness of what dangers might lie ahead.
While not as dire as being hunkered down, riding out a hurricane, poets and painters often decline to heed advice in their art, and plunge forward with controversial work in spite of risks to their reputation. Risk taking is part of the process of making art. One can never be sure how work will be assessed, valued, or denied by one’s peers and the art world at large. But the artist perseveres.
Poet Joanne McNeil Hayes and painter T. Budge Hyde have spent 30 years and 50 years, respectively, riding out the risk in their art with successes, near misses, and full rejections. In this body of work, the past twenty years of writing and painting are presented as individual works of art that come together for the purpose of exploring the risks. Sometimes these individual works of painting and poetry bear the same titles, often they do not, as they were not designed to represent each other but perhaps to have similar sensibilities. Much of the work in this publication has been viewed in art galleries or in poetry journals, but has not been compiled before now in this manner and with this presentation. This book also serves as a series of conversations between poet and painter through their art.
Joanne McNeil Hayes and T. Budge Hyde
