The Open Door series highlights creative relationships and collaborations rooted in the Midwest, inviting two featured pairs to share work that opens up poetry as an expansive art. March’s featured readers are Claire Pentecost with Beth Jacobs and MMM with Clareese Hill.

This is a hybrid event, which will be offered in-person and via livestream.

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates our planet. Her work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. Pentecost has exhibited work at dOCUMENTA (13), the 13th Istanbul Biennial, White Chapel Gallery, and others. She is a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, a collective exploring cultural change in response to ecological crisis, and the Anthropocene Commons, an international research network. With Brian Holmes, she directs Watershed Art & Ecology, an experimental cultural space in Chicago.

MMM sings research findings as freestyle poetry while projecting performance footage and stop-motion of unclassified space social artifacts. MMM earned their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with a New Artist’s Society Fellowship in Photography and their BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. From 2004 to 2015, MMM was a highly recognized photographer at the NASA Glenn Research Center. Their archive lives at the Art Institute of Chicago, Library of Congress, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Great Lakes Science Center, Discover magazine, Popular Photography, Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Clinic, Mercury 13 Women, Progressive Insurance, Dalad collection, and others.

Clareese Hill is a practice-based researcher exploring the validity of the word “identity” from her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman by collaborating with emerging technology. She has performed lectures at Aalto University, Göteborgs Universitet Akademin Valand, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, the Chicago Art Department, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. She was also a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future fellow (Phase One). Clareese has published academic essays in various peer-reviewed journals. She holds a practice-based research PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Beth Jacobs is a poet and non-fiction writer who facilitates poetry groups with children, grandparents raising grandchildren, new parents, and staff at Family Focus of Evanston, Illinois. Her trajectory moved past a long career as a therapist and writer into teaching that blends poetry, psychology, and Buddhism. She is the author of Long Shadows of Practice: Poems, Writing for Emotional Balance, Paper Sky, The Original Buddhist Psychology, and A Buddhist Journal. She is grateful for these activities and for her family.

In-Person Attendance: Masks are strongly encouraged and available at check-in for those who would like to wear one. The Foundation reserves the right to update this policy if community levels of COVID-19 increase significantly. Read our full COVID-19 Health & Safety Guidelines. Guests are encouraged to register in advance.

Livestream Attendance: The livestream link will be shared with registered guests on the day of the event. In order to receive the livestream details, please register in advance here.

The Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This event will include CART captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Beth Jacobs, Chicago, Claire Pentecost, Clareese Hill, Loop, MMM, MMM + Clareese Hill, Open Door: Claire Pentecost + Beth Jacobs, Poetry Foundation