The Bailey Gallery’s exhibition, “a shell called the Neptune—” is named for and based in the poetry of Mary Oliver, who spent the final years of her life in Hobe Sound. Profoundly rooted in nature—often literally composed while she walked in the woods—Oliver’s poetry seeks a kind of empathetic objectivity with plants and animals, sand and sea. The musicality, vivid descriptiveness, and gentle but deep insight of Oliver’s poems all complement the colors and shapes of the pieces in the exhibition. In this program, writer and professor Taylor Hagood will introduce Oliver’s life and career and read a sampling from her work that will lend words to the artworks in the exhibition and draw together this combination of Treasure Coast creativity. 

Taylor Hagood is a writer, lecturer, artist, and professor of American literature at Florida Atlantic University. A specialist on the work of William Faulkner, he has published books of literary criticism, including Faulkner, Writer of Disability (winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Studies) as well as the biography, Theodore Pratt: A Florida Writer’s Life, and the recently-published chapbook of poetry, Lepidoctora. His paintings in oil and gouache were featured for several years at Profile Art Gallery in Jupiter, and he lectures at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and other venues around south Florida.