Mark Turbyfill

Mark Turbyfill was a dancer, poet, and painter from Chicago. While his professional dance career began in 1919, he gained renown in the 1920s for his avant-garde verse. His poems were published in Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and in Poetry magazine, whose May 1926 issue was devoted entirely to his long poem “A Marriage with Space.” His first book of poetry, The Living Frieze (1921), was published in a limited edition by Monroe Wheeler. His later collection, The Words Beneath Us: Balletic Poems (Tower Features Press, 1951), weaves together photographs of experimental performance with poetry.

Beginning in the 1940s, Turbyfill also produced visual art. His early work displays a surrealist influence that moves on to a style reminiscent of abstract expressionism, which he practiced until the 1970s. He continued to blend together his different artistic interests by incorporating texts from his poetry in his drawings, which have been described by critics as “Turbyfiligrees.”

Turbyfill’s unpublished autobiography, Whistling in the Windy City: Memoirs of a Poet-Dancer-Painter, records his artistic interests and products. His papers are held at the Newberry Library, and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago holds several of his paintings and watercolors, last exhibited in 2006.