Poetry, Paintings & A Story Art Exhibit

Poetry, Paintings & A Story by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Linda Hillringhouse

Wednesday, September 20th to Saturday, October 14th 

Meet & Greet Opening:  Saturday, September 23rd from 1pm-4pm 

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an award-winning, nationally known poet with more than twenty books to her credit, the latest being When the Stars Were Still Visible, published by the Stephen F. Austin University Press.  She is the founder and executive director of the nationally acclaimed Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ and editor of the well- respected Paterson Literary Review, which has published such literary luminaries as Allen Ginsburg, William Stafford, and Marge Piercy. She is Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at Binghamton University, SUNY. Mazziotti Gillan is a self-taught painter and collagist who says of her work, “My art comes from an instinctive place. In my watercolors and collages I try to do what I do in poetry—that is to let go, to allow the old wise woman who lives in my belly to take over. Allowing my imagination to take over gives me the freedom to paint people, interiors, or the external world as they exist in my mind rather than in reality.” She has exhibited her work at various venues on both the east and west coast. 

Linda Hillringhouse is a self-taught painter and poet. She has exhibited her work at the Newark Museum, Yale School of Art, Ben Shan Center for the Visual Arts at William Paterson University, among other venues. She is included in the 20th Century Self-Taught Artists Archive at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York. Hillringhouse says of her work that the figures she paints “seem stunned by the miraculous visible world but somehow know they are bound to the invisible world. My paintings seem to occur on the border between these realms.” Hillringhouse was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and second-place winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her book of poetry, The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For was published by the New York Quarterly Press, May 2020 and was shortlisted for The Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in 2021.

Visiting days open to the public are Wednesdays through Saturdays 1pm- 4pm.  Admission fee suggestion is $3. 

Woman in Garden, gouache with collage elements on paper, 12” x 12” by Linda Hillringhouse