Bob Holman and Archie Rand "Invisible City" at FREIGHT+VOLUME

James Kalm has been a fan of Archie Rand for decades, and has recently been becoming more engaged with the New York poetry scene. So when he caught wind of this collaborative project between a local poetry legend, and a painter’s painter, the draw was undeniable. “Invisible City” is a set of 50 diptychs (a hand lettered text atop with figurative picture below) that fill the gallery and mash-up disparate often vulgar visual statements with looping text that plays off rhyme, and all matter of alliteration, rythmatic and linguistically whimsy. This collaboration is an outgrowth of these artists’s long time friendship, and a desire to bring poetry into a greater engagement with New York’s contemporary visual culture. Holman is captured reading parts of the poem, and Rand gives viewers a brief interview in which he discusses the process of putting together the panels, how he got Holman to letter in his text, as well as painterly aspects of the work. This program was recorded September 9, 2017.