MONTE CASTELLO DI VIBIO.- The Pooe Farm launch a biennial exhibition program with work by artist Kay Rosen in the Italian Hilltown of Monte Castello di Vibio (MCV), Umbria, Italy.

The exhibition will open to the public on May 30, 2026. Rosen’s exhibition expands on her decades-long investigation into the structure, sound, and social dimensions of language.

Installed throughout several domicile dwellings in the medieval hill town, Rosen’s exhibition will be in a regional conversation with the work and the environments initiated by Sol LeWitt and Brian O’Doherty, two American conceptualists who developed artistic practices and visual vocabularies in response to Umbrian cultural history and its physical environment.

Rosen’s exhibition will continue this conceptual and geographic dialogue, building on LeWitt and O’ Doherty’s intellectual and aesthetic work by juxtaposing Rosen’s mutable, spatial, and civic explorations with the Umbrian fresco tradition.

For over six decades, Rosen has explored the potential of linguistic form—its denotations, connotations, and visual possibilities—through paintings, drawings, wall works, collages, and editions. Employing visual, grammatical, and typographical strategies such as color, scale, and geometry, she invites acts of reading, misreading, and rereading. Her works distort and subvert linguistic norms, revealing how words communicate and miscommunicate, and how meaning slips between syntax and structure.

“Rosen is interested in the liminal, in crossovers and conversions, transitions and transfers, the words hidden within other words, the meanings that leak out, the things we say as well as or instead of the things we mean to say,” writes David Frankel in Artforum (September 2023). Poet and novelist Eileen Myles has called Rosen “the poet of the art world.” As Rosen herself wrote in Art in America (2014): “The linguist in me wanted meaning to be carried by the structure of the words, not type style; the inner painter insisted that color convey meaning; the sculptor in me obsessed about the construction of letterforms through materials and process; and any poetic instincts strove for efficiency.”

Thirty-five miles from Rosen’s MCV exhibition is Sol LeWitt’s adopted Spoleto home and studio; the location of several early, site-specific pencil wall drawings and where LeWitt’s fluid polychrome geometries originated. Today the Mahler & LeWitt Studios, founded in their former workspace, hosts residencies, exhibitions, and research projects, preserving LeWitt’s collaborative ethos and his transatlantic connection between American Minimalism and Italian modernism. The Hilltown of Todi is nine miles from MCV and hosts Brian O’Doherty’s Casa Dipinta (“Painted House”). Created with his wife, art historian Barbara Novak— they transformed a medieval dwelling into a total artwork developed over fifty years. The house serves as a biographical and conceptual self-portrait, merging O’Doherty’s linguistic and visual systems into an immersive environment that transforming every wall, ceiling, and stairwell into a field of coded geometry.

Kay Rosen (b. 1943, Corpus Christi, TX) recently presented her first major European solo exhibition, Kay Rosen: NOW AND THEN, at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen (2023–24). In 2021, she was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., to create SORRY, a large-scale, site-responsive painting for the museum’s East Building. Her mid-career survey Kay Rosen: Li[f]eli[k]e, curated by Connie Butler and Terry R. Myers, was jointly exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art and Design (1998). Other solo presentations include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Grazer Kunstverein (Graz); Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney); the Art Institute of Chicago; Dunedin Public Art Gallery (New Zealand); the Drawing Center (New York); MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, MA); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); and Witte de With (Rotterdam). Rosen participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and 2000. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants, an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, and the SJ Weiler Fund Award. Rosen’s work is held in major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA (New York), the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and Collection Lambert (Avignon).

Rosen taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years. She lives and works in New York City and Gary, Indiana.

A publication featuring essays by Michelle Grabner and Robin Warrt will accompany the exhibition.

The POOR FARM (est. 2008) is an exhibition, residency, and publishing program located in Little Wolf, Wisconsin. The POOR FARM is a 501 (c)(3). Major exhibitions by Sky Hopinka, Gretchen Bender, Guillaume Leblon, Lucio Pozzi and other international artists have been featured in year-long presentations and publications. In 2015 The POOR FARM participated in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia at the American Pavilion’s 2025 exhibition: “PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity.

Kay Rosen’s 2026 exhibition in MVC will be the backdrop to NIDO, the POOR FARM’s 2026 annual residency program in MCV, directed by Chicago-based artists Mark Jeffery and Kelly Kaczynski.