Celebration Fortnight — Day 3

Each day during our celebration we will focus on a single aspect of the Foundation. Today THF president and board member Jim Kacian the many varied Galleries that can be found on the Foundation.

The Haiku Foundation Galleries has had a very busy 2016, featuring work in several varieties of visual media, ranging from the THF Haiga Galleries, through the Touchstone Gardens, then to the Video Archive, and concluding with the Cover Art Gallery.

 
The Year in Review
 

The Haiga Galleries will have featured the creative talents of a dozen different artist/poets in 2016. The classical approach to the genre could be found in galleries by Steven Addiss, Ron C. Moss, Ion Codrescu, Pamela Babusci and Lidia Rozmus. We range a bit farther afield with Marlene Mountain’s “image haiku” and the work of Beth McFarland, and go completely idiosyncratic with the haiku comics of Jessica Tremblay and the montage haiga of Guy Beining. And then there are Jim Kacian’s and Dietmar Tauchner’s unique Video Haiku offerings.

The Touchstone Gardens features photographs supplied by Touchstone Award winners, showing where they have chosen to display their award stones. The gallery was updated in 2016, and will be each year.

We added several videos to our dedicated YouTube channel in a variety of categories: lectures, readings, presentations, etc. Most were included as a result of submissions to HaikuLife, the Foundation’s haiku film festival, part of International Haiku Poetry Day (IHPD).

And 2016 saw the inauguration of our first Cover Art Gallery, compiled by Ellen Olinger, with the hope of more to follow, by her and others.

 
What’s Next
 

We have haiga galleries scheduled for the first couple months of 2017, and will be soliciting collections from artists shortly. If you would like to see your haiga featured in a THF Gallery, contact us.

It’s never too early to begin work on your haiku video for IHPD. We welcome submissions in four categories: free format, HaikuLife format, feature format and video haiga. You can find details on our IHPD page.

And would you like to compile a Cover Art Gallery? Contact us — we’d love to discuss it with you.

Once a year we ask the haiku community to help us meet our financial challenges. We reserve the period from Thanksgiving through St. Nicholas Day, the time our culture has has set aside to note our many blessings and show our appreciation. Thank you to those of you who have already contributed. If you have not done so yet, please take this opportunity to help us continue our work — details on our donation page. Again this year we have the support of an anonymous angel who will double your donations — for every dollar you commit, the Foundation receives $2. Please help us make the most of this generous offer, and thanks in advance for your support of The Haiku Foundation, and of haiku itself. We wish you a most happy holiday season.