CHICAGO.- The Smart Museum of Art presents Mark Turbyfill: Works on Paper, on view through September 10, 2006. Although remembered today mainly for his contributions to the worlds of avant-garde poetry (in 1926 the vanguard magazine Poetry devoted an entire issue to his writings) and dance (in the 1920s and '30s, he was a principal dancer with Allied Artists and partnered with legendary Chicago choreographer Ruth Page), Mark Turbyfill was also an accomplished visual artist. Seeing continuity in all his creative endeavors, Turbyfill at times utilized texts lifted from his own poetry in his figurative and abstract paintings and drawings. With evocative titles such as Yellow Calligraphic Poem, Green Oracle, and Sibylline Head, his visual work also gestures toward a mythic literary past. This intimate exhibition features representative works on paper from the 1950s to the mid-1960s drawn from the Smart Museum's permanent collection.

Turbyfill's childhood interest in drawing and painting resurfaced in the 1930s. After meeting the Abstract Expressionist Mark Tobey, Turbyfill began to paint and draw professionally. His first solo exhibition was in 1948, and he exhibited regularly in Chicago throughout the 1950s and '60s. For Turbyfill, his work as a poet, dancer, and visual artist were continuous; he stated that he tried "to make poems clear-cut, like they were cut in stone" and "you want to feel that they were practically three-dimensional instead of a flat thing on a page." He strove for the same effect as a painter. One series of works, for instance, contain lines from his poem A Marriage in Space, written at odd angles underneath abstract plays of pigment and color.

This exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art features representative works on paper from the late 1940s to mid-1960s. During this period, Turbyfill turned from an unsettling Surrealist-inspired figuration to more abstract modes of representation filled with web-like linear patterns and swirling brushstrokes.

Mark Turbyfill: Works on Paper is curated by Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.