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Author Archives: Richard A. Peña
Collections: Gregg Museum of Art and Design, North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC, November 20, 2020, The Gregg Museum of Art and Design, North Carolina State University Selection Committee voted to acquire five Photographic Works on Paper from the Richard and Elizabeth Peña Family Living Trust. The selected Photographic Works on Paper included individual prints from both portfolio series, “Recent Findings: Southern Exposure” and “Argus, Mysterious […]
July’s Fire of Life: Poetry
My daddy is a dragonfly, My mamma is a butterfly I was born in July to fly, not to cry Anywhere the four winds blow is my home Afraid not of garden gnomes Oh, the colors of summer, slumber with a number Under blue skies, time to say new goodbyes As old as the sun […]
Last Exit to Hoboken – 14th Street Rhapsody: Poetry
Ho-Ho-Kus, Hocus-Pocus, Abracadabra, and Moonachie too. Half-past Weehawken, under the neon starlight of the Jersey night, in the taverns of Hoboken, you find yourself broke, looking to find redemption, the sublime, and the Christopher Street line. These vagabond blues come in so many hues and road-worn shoes in a room of lost and found souls […]
Blessed is the Night | Division Street
[Short Libretto-Ballad] Blessed is the night. Go down these city streets, down Division Street, way down Division Street, where the wind sways the autumn trees, like an autumn song. So blessed is the night. Oh, the leaves rustle all around my feet, streetlamp lanterns, dancing shadows, nocturne patterns, with rod iron bones and brownstones, echoes-of-elevated-trains, […]
Of Beauty and of Death
Forgive me with kindness for speaking of something as morose such as of beauty and death in the same breath, but both are breathing, iconic, mysterious, and often misunderstood. Beauty and death are seldom the points of reflection in daily life, given the emotional and spiritual weight they pay tribute to. The world we know […]
Of Beauty and of Death: Poetry
O’ beauty and of death, when do the drumbeats rest for those blessed? When do the drumbeats rest for those who transgressed? When do the drumbeats rest for the obsessed? O’ beauty and of death, the sky is thy paper and the sea is thy ink. Remember what beauty is, and the moon shall shed […]
Deep Below the Rich Earth: Poetry
Deep below the rich earth lays a reddish-brown bird. Every now and then, I hear the reddish-brown bird sing at night; songs of solitude and beauty resonate in the cadence of passing time. I try to ignore the songs, but they take root in my memory like words to a contract, as unspoken bonds of […]
Michel Dahamani Gatlif: The Persistence of Memory and Transnationalism
The Romani people, also known as Gypsies, historically became a widely dispersed ethnic segment throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, which led the Gypsies to arrive in Europe from the Middle East in the fourteenth century. Separating from the Dom people or closely having a similar history. Genetic findings in 2012 suggest they […]