Tuesday, February 2, 2021
“Pictures of Poets” will be on display through March 26 in the Corner Gallery in Boswell Hall on the North Idaho College campus in Coeur d’Alene. The poets pictured here, clockwise from the top left, are Mark Anderson, M. L. Smoker, Robert Pinsky and Claudia Castro Luna.
The photography of Dean Davis is featured in “Pictures of Poets,” a new exhibition in the North Idaho College Corner Gallery in Boswell Hall.
This exhibition is a multimedia experience of portraits of poets, displayed in large, 26-by-40-inch photographs in the gallery, complemented by their spoken poetry online. There will also be a virtual gallery of the NIC show on Davis’s website, PicturesOfPoets.com, with recordings of the poets reading their work. Inspired after attending a poetry reading at the 2017 Spokane Arts Awards, Davis created this multi-disciplinary series, showcasing both the portraits and the poetry, which he continues to expand.
A Spokane commercial and fine art photographer, Davis is a board member of the Spokane Arts Fund and the immediate past chair of the Spokane Arts Commission. He is past president of the American Advertising Federation and has been a board member of Spokane MARCOM, a professional communications organization. He started his commercial photography business and studio in downtown Spokane in 1997, and his most recent fine art show was a seven-month exhibit at Spokane’s Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, titled “The Artist’s Palette – Through the Lens of Dean Davis.”
Davis was born in Würzburg, Germany to a U.S. military family and spent seven years in the Army as a young adult, his last four as a Dutch translator in Europe. He was part owner of Spokane’s first microbrewery, the Fort Spokane Brewery. He founded the Inland Empire Blues Society in 1991 and spent 13-plus years as co-host of the “KKZX Blues Show with Ted and Dean.”
The Corner Gallery in Boswell Hall will be open regular hours for the viewing of “Pictures of Poets,” which closes March 26. The gallery is open Mondays to Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. If the gallery is not open at the time you visit, please refer to information on the door to contact someone to open it.
Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, there will not be a public reception for this exhibition. The gallery follows all North Idaho College COVID-19 safety protocols, requiring cloth facial coverings and physical distancing of 6 feet. For more information and updates on NIC’s safety measures, please visit nic.edu/coronavirus.