John Giorno

(Off View)

John Giorno was an American poet, devout Buddhist in the Tibetan Nyingma lineage, performer, and multimedia artist, known for his live performances and typographic silkscreen paintings and sculptures. Giorno first rose to prominence in the early 1960s, gaining attention as the subject of several of Andy Warhol’s experimental films, including the groundbreaking durational work Sleep. In 1963 Giorno founded the not-for-profit Giorno Poetry Systems, and began producing experimental poetry-based multimedia projects and records. Notable among them remains Dial-A-Poem, a dedicated phone line providing pre-recorded contemporary poems to callers. Participants in the project included John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and Laurie Anderson among others. It remains operational today. 

At the same time, Girono began producing silkscreened paintings featuring lines and excised fragments of poetry, a practice he continued for the duration of his career. This body of work later extended into carved bluestone sculptures, also bearing lines of his poetry. 

Exhibitions of Giorno’s work include a traveling retrospective originating at Palais de Tokyo, Paris among others.