In his roles as a curator and primarily as an artist, Michael Morris has been a key figure of the west coast art scene since the 1960s and his contribution to the development of Vancouver as a contemporary art city has been immense. Morris was engaged with Concrete Poetry in the 1960s. The Concrete Poetry movement was perhaps the first global art movement, springing up in South and North America, Japan and Europe in the mid to late 1950s.

Published in conjunction with Black Dog Publishing, UK, this richly illustrated book includes critical essays on concrete poetry and Michael Morris, featuring a chronology of Morris’s prolific practice from the mid-1960s onwards. It follows the 2012 exhibition of the same name that was held at the Belkin Art Gallery, which focused on a series of large-scale paintings with inserted mirrors that Morris made in 1969 — his last paintings until the early 1980s — brought together at the Belkin for the first time since then. The Belkin’s show presented the paintings in the context of contemporaneous examples of concrete poetry, a practice that had influenced Morris and catalyzed his move into other forms of art making such as sculpture, photography and performance, examples of which were also represented in the exhibition. This book focuses on Morris’s activity in the late 1960s and his “last paintings,” in an attempt to restore them to an art historical context.

In conjunction with Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry All are welcome. Admission is free. General seating. SCHEDULE 1:00 pm Introductions Shelly Rosenblum, Curator of Academic Programs, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Michael Turner, Author and Curator Vancouver 1:30 pm Stephen Scobie, Poet and Scholar Victoria, BC “Summer Elephants: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Concrete Poetry” 2:30 pm Lori Emerson, Department of English University of Colorado, Boulder “A Typewriter is a Poem. A Poem is Not a Typewriter” 3:30 pm Coffee break 4:00 pm Liz Kotz Department of the History of Art University of California, Riverside “the kind of grid a typewriter produces in a very machine-like way” 5:00 pm Postscript Donato Mancini, Department of English, UBC