This site provides information about current, past, and future EarSay projects, as well as news updates, press kits, press clippings, mission statement, bios, info on resources, associate artists and organizations, how to give, how to buy things and how to get in touch.
EarSay is an artist-driven non-profit arts organization dedicated to uncovering and portraying stories of the uncelebrated. Our projects bridge the divide between documentary and expressive forms in books, exhibitions, on stage, in sound & electronic media. We are committed to fostering understanding across cultures, generations, gender and class, through artistic productions and education. We bring our work to theatres, museums, schools, festivals, universities and prisons. Scroll over the top menu to view projects, get information, shop, etc.
New Project Coming in 2023
Judith Sloan and Andrew Griffin won 2022 Artist Commissioning Grants from NYSCA (New York State Council on the Arts)
Coming in 2023: A new project of music and theatre focused on Climate Crisis called This Is Not A Drill. We are interviewing people not only about the science but on how they feel about climate issues, and what they are doing. What kind of actions are you taking? We are looking for people of all ages and races and from various parts of the world. If you are interesting in being interviewed please email us info at earsay.org
New BOOK PROJECT! Openings
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings Poems written by Adeena Karasick. Book visualized by Warren Lehrer. Published by Lavender Ink Press. October, 2023. 6.25” x 8” x 96 pages. Hardcover, cloth and 3-color foil stamped paper over boards. Smythe-sewn, archival paper, black and white interior.
This work is the first collaboration between poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist Adeena Karasick, and designer/author and vis lit practitioner Warren Lehrer. The book features two poems—written by Karasick, visualized by Lehrer—about re-entering the world after a pandemic that never seems to end.
The title poem, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, is an ecstatically wrought, post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings. It tracks the challenges of opening(s) read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Employing fragmentation, layered language, and sonic wordplay, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings explores a range of intralingual etymologies of the word “opening,” laced with post-consumerist ironic and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. The poem foregrounds language as a material, physical organism of hope—highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transporting us through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.
Described in the book as a Panddendum, the second poem, Touching in the Wake of The Virus, navigates how in the wake of the pandemic, we must renegotiate the sense of “touch.” After being in solitude for 2+ years, and riddled with fear of further contamination, it explores the nature of touch; how do we touch, and in what ways; (what’s appropriate, inappropriate, riotous, propriotous), when we are always on the surface of contact. With reference to Derrida’s notion of how touch is fundamental to being human; Touching in the Wake of The Virus asks, can one / ever really touch anything; touch nothing / touch / without being touched / how does one touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much.
Lehrer’s sensuous, textural, textual rendering explores the same questions as it plays with and diagrams approach/withdrawal, navigating between and through a landscape of barriers and openings, seeking intimacy, daring to touch and be touched. His typographic compositions give form to the interior, emotional, metaphorical, historical and performative underpinnings of both poems. Together, the writing and visuals create a new whole that engages the reader to become an active participant in the experience of the poems. The book is a work of poetry, art, design, performance score and commentary about the shared global and very human experience of being separated and trying our best to come back together.
The book is augmented by a soundtrack recording of both poems performed by Karasick with music by Grammy-award winning composer/musician Frank London.
EarSay is delighted to announce the publication of Warren Lehrer and Dennis J Bernstein’s new book Five Oceans in a Teaspoon(Paper Crown Press, September 2019).
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Brilliant and beautiful! Thank you for bringing in the new.”Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of The Color Purple.
“Bernstein and Lehrer—the Lennon and McCartney of viz-lit—have reunited at the height of their creative powers. Five Oceans in a Teaspoon speaks to the madness, vulnerability, aspiration and language of our time. The gutsiness and raw emotion of the writing, revelatory appeal of the visual compositions, and brevity of the form creates an intensely moving experiential journey.” Steven Heller, Design and Visual Culture Historian, author New York Times Book Review Visuals column
“In the long history of graphic word works, few, if any, have this range and repleteness…A completely virtuosic work.” Johanna Drucker Foremost Vis Lit scholar, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA
“Five Oceans in a Teaspoon re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope… Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.” Bob Holman Poet, poetry activist chronicler, founder: Bowery Poetry Club
