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Furnival, John, 1933-2020

 Person

Dates

  • Existence: 1933 - 2020

Biography

John Furnival was born in London in 1933, educated at the Royal College of Art, and taught at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham in the 1960s-1970s. He and poets Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Henri Chopin and Tom Phillips expanded the genre of concrete poetry to pioneer the broader concept of visual poetry. Furnival founded the small presses, Openings and Openings-Closings, to disseminate concrete poetry and visual poetry. He exhibited in the first international exhibition of “Experimental Poetry” in Oxford in 1965 and has continued to participate in international poetry exhibitions in the subsequent decades, including “The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century” at the South Bank Centre, 2015. His artwork and poetry is in collections worldwide, including the Tate, the Getty, and Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.

Furnival died May 31, 2020.

Found in 2 Collections and/or Records:

Concrete Poetry

 Collection
Identifier: MS28
Abstract John Furnival (b. 1933), Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Henry Chopin and Tom Phillips expanded the genre of concrete poetry to pioneer the broader concept of visual poetry. This collection of concrete poetry includes correspondence and poems sent to John Furnival between 1963 and 1970 by Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Aram Saroyan, Jiří Valoch, and Jonathan Williams and other concrete poets. The bulk of the collection consists of typopoems by Dom...
Dates: 1963 - 1970

Ian Hamilton Finlay Correspondence

 Collection
Identifier: MS35
Abstract

Poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in 1925 in Nassau, Bahamas, but relocated to Scotland with his family as a child. This collection contains letters between Ian Finaly or his wife Sue Finlay and literary friends John Furnival and Derek and Peggie Stanford.

Dates: 1949 - 1970; Other: Majority of material found within 1968 - 1970

Additional filters:

Subject
Artists 1
Gardeners 1
Pacifists 1
Poets, Scottish--20th century 1