Field Notes: A Writing Workshop

Join us for a multisensory writing workshop where participants utilize art making and their own experiences to create poetry.

Join us for a multisensory workshop designed to encourage art lovers to begin or deepen their writing practice. Exploring Chaim Gross’s historic sculpture studio and the temporary exhibition Figure/Ground: Landscapes in the Collection of the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation, participants develop poems and free-form essays in response to the artworks and their own experience. Drawing functions as a perceptual tool, opening and deepening our ways of seeing and leading into guided writing practices.

Field Notes is rooted in the artistic landscape of Greenwich Village as a space of exchange across the arts. Among the many artists who frequented Chaim Gross’s home was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who described “the human quality, the interdependence of the human” as the distinctive essence of Gross’s figures.

The workshop is led by artist and educator Pamela Lawton in collaboration with Manuela Ruckdeschel, the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation’s 2025–26 NYU Public Humanities Fellow.

Notebooks and drawing materials are provided.

No prior writing or drawing experience is required.

Manuela Maria Ruckdeschel is a PhD candidate in the Department of German at New York University, where her research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics. Field Notes is the result of her year-long research at the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation on visual art and different modes of looking, as well as her scholarship on poetry as a practice of worldmaking. Alongside her academic work, she writes poetry and nonfiction, has presented her writing at the Brooklyn Museum’s Inkwells program, and studied with poets including Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Anne Waldman.

Pamela Lawton is an artist and educator with a focus on multisensory artmaking. She is the creator of “Multisensory Drawing in Siena” at the Siena Art Institute in Italy, and of “Drawing as Seeing,” a program in Siena and Athens, Greece, for people with any level of sight. She consulted on the development of “Tactile Transmissions” at the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation, an Access program for low vision and blind visitors. She frequently collaborates with poets and writers, most recently for “Ode to Exile & Tranquility” with Anne Waldman (forthcoming 2027). Her relief casts will be featured at the Zurcher Gallery in New York City, May 11–17, 2026. She is on the faculty of Manhattanville College.

Programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Photo by Manuela Ruckdeschel.