BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required

Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.

Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert—just bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.

→ Ashbery, John. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking Press, 1975.

→ Yau, John. "Further Adventures in Monochrome." In Further Adventures in Monochrome. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

For National Poetry Month, we're reading two poets thinking through what images can and can't do.

John Ashbery's Pulitzer Prize-winning poem takes its starting point from a 1524 painting by Parmigianino — a self-portrait rendered in a convex mirror, distorted world and all. Yau's poem moves through the monochrome as a site of obsession and quiet strangeness. Together they make for an unexpected conversation about color, surface, and what we're really looking at when we look at art.

Optional reading:
→ "John Ashbery 101." Poetry Foundation.
→ "Further Adventures in the Monochrome: A Conversation with John Yau." Los Angeles Review of Books.