The Stranger You Are: Art by Gronk

Art by Gronk
Poetry by Gail Wronsky

“Wronsky is unafraid to try to nail down feelings that are part of the eternal, macabre romance between life and death . . . her project is important.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Nerve, wit, dazzle, shape-shifting, a painful clearness; an urgent, generous, funny, dreadful intensity of imagination.”—Robert Hass

Gronk was raised in East Los Angeles and lives in downtown L.A. Gail Wronsky was raised in suburban Detroit and lives in the hippie-haven of Topanga Canyon. But as artists they have found common ground—a shared commitment to the offbeat and the beautiful, to the sightly absurd and the slyly surreal, to blurring the distinction between our inner lives of dreams and imagination and our daily realities. Wronsky’s poems are grounded in poetic imagery; Gronk’s drawings are as well. Wronsky mixes vernacular diction, or spoken language, with a more formal style in a way that is entirely unique; Gronk’s work alludes to both street art and classical art in
his signature style. Both are committed to making memorable work that surprises and delights, that sharpens and feeds our everyday lives as well as our deepest selves.

Bios:
Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collections Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New; Selected Poems (White Pine Press); Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon Press); Poems for Infidels (Red Hen Press); Fuegos Florales/Flowering Fires, a translation of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy’s poems, winner of the American Poetry Prize from Settlement House Press, and Tomorrow You’ll Be One of Us (Dadaist sci-fi poems, What Books Press), coauthored with Chuck Rosenthal and illustrated by Gronk. The recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council, she is a founding member of the Glass Table Artists Collective, and lives in Topanga, California. 

Painter, printmaker, and performance artist Gronk has created stage designs for the Santa Fe Opera, the LA Opera, Latino Theater Company, and the East West Players. He’s also collaborated on performances by the Kronos Quartet. He has exhibited at or curated work for many institutions, including the UCLA Hammer Museum, the UCLA Fowler Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the San Francisco Mexican Museum, and the San
Jose Museum of Art. He was given a career retrospective at the University of New Mexico, where he was in residence. He is a founding member of ASCO, a multimedia arts collective of the 1970s.