Exhibition Opening Conversation: William Blake — Artist, Poet, Maker, and Radical Thinker
Elizabeth Wyckoff, Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Timothy Young, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, in conversation about William Blake’s illuminated poems. Moderated by Richard Brodhead, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English Emeritus and Interim Director at the Yale Center for British Art, 2024–25
About this program
Join exhibition cocurators Elizabeth Wyckoff and Timothy Young to learn more about William Blake: Burning Bright, which showcases the YCBA’s impressive collection of works by William Blake (1757–1827). What made the artist and poet unique? The curators provide an overview of Blake's career as presented in the exhibition and then focus on how he defied the norms to create the highly original “illuminated books” at the core of this show. Blake’s invention of a method for printing both image and text from a single copper plate resulted in an unprecedented fusion of art. Intimate in scale and created to be experienced in book form, the colorful pages draw the reader into Blake’s distinctive worldview. Richard Brodhead, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English Emeritus and Interim Director at the Yale Center for British Art, moderates the program.