New York, 1936—2019

At the crossroads of poetry, visual art, music, and performance, John Giorno’s work targets a broad audience, redefining the capabilities of linguistic forms. Born in New York, where he lived his entire life, Giorno is recognized as a pioneer in the field of performance poetry and spoken word, as well as a major activist for AIDS awareness, LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-war struggles. Giorno’s relationships with artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg profoundly influenced his work and encouraged him to bring poetry off the printed page and into visual, musical, and political realms. 

In his first poetry anthology, The American Book of the Dead (1964), Giorno employed Pop Art techniques such as the appropriation of found words and found imagery, and soon after began applying cut-up and montage techniques to found texts, inspired by his close relationship with Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. In the 1970s, Giorno began making silkscreened prints, using vibrant colors to give his poems a powerful visual force. In 1989, he made the first of his Poem Paintings, using phrases taken from his poems, combining his interest in Buddhist spiritual texts with his Pop sensibility. Silkscreened onto canvas, large words appear in white, black, or colored backgrounds and mirror the repetitive-like nature of a mantra. A life-long performer, Giorno would use the intonations of his voice to add layers of depth and complexity to his use of language, and these painted words carry the visual rhythms and tones of a voice, a song, or a prayer. Other visual works include works on paper, stone sculptures, and audio-visual installations, all of which place language at their center.

Dial-A-Poem, one of Giorno’s most iconic projects, consists of a free telephone line connecting listeners to the recorded voices of hundreds of poets, musicians, and activists. When Dial-A-Poem was included in The Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition Information in 1970, it established itself within the canon of American conceptual art. It remains active today at (+1 917 994 8949).

Giorno started a nonprofit organization, Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS), in 1965. Initially used as a pseudonym for his own political activism, it evolved into a multi-layered entity dedicated to supporting artists, poets, and musicians, with a board of directors that included William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Les Levine, Kynaston McShine, and Keith Haring, among others. In 1972, GPS launched a record label, GPS Records, and released dozens of LPs by a range of spoken word artists and musicians that include Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Sonic Youth. In 1984, GPS established the AIDS Treatment Project as an emergency response to the impacts of the epidemic on artists’ lives and provided funds to artists and poets living with AIDS through the early 2000s. GPS also produced concerts, conferences, and other events throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. 

In 2008, the first career-spanning collection of Giorno’s poems, Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007, was published. In 2021, Giorno posthumously received the American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation for his memoir Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment. A major retrospective of Giorno’s work, Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno, was curated by Ugo Rondinone for Palais de Tokyo in 2015, and was re-imagined for 13 spaces in New York City in 2017, and a website.

John Giorno passed away in New York in 2019.

In 2023, Giorno Poetry Systems relaunched under new leadership and with a mission to apply its legacy to the present moment. Headquartered in the iconic building at 222 Bowery in downtown Manhattan, GPS supports a new generation of artists, poets, and musicians via public events, a record label, small grants, and new international editions of Dial-A-Poem.