Painting the World: Conversations with Writers at the Elizabeth Bishop Festival

One of the afternoon events at the Elizabeth Bishop Festival in Great Village, N.S., on 8 August 2015, will be a conversation with four exceptional visual artists: Emma FitzGerald, Carol Laing, Joy Laking and Linda Rae Dornan. This conversation will be moderated by writer and Mount Allison Fine Arts professor Anne Koval. This profile is of moderator Anne Koval.

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Anne Koval (https://kovalcurator.wordpress.com/) is a poet, curator and art historian who teaches at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. She has long been interested in the intersection between image and text and is currently working on a collection of ekphrastic poems, After Art.  Her recent curatorial projects include Paper Doll, an exhibition centred around an archival collection of handmade paper dolls and clothing by poet Sylvia Plath with the work of seven contemporary artists. Last spring she curated and performed in MUSE an exhibition held at the Banff Park Museum in partnership with the Whyte Museum. She is currently working on a contemporary exhibition Fairy-Tails that looks at the narrative relationship between animals and humans. She has just embarked on writing a biography of the painter Mary Pratt.

 Cover of catalogue for Paper Doll exhibition

Anne has had a long relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, once doing a residency at the house in Great Village and also participating in the Elizabeth Bishop conference “It must be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop,” University of King’s College in Halifax. She is always happy to return to Great Village, which she considers a very special place.