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Housebound: Fairfield Porter and his Circle of Poets and Painters at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y., August 7, 2020–January 31, 2021. Photo: Gary Mamay
LIVE-STREAM TALK: Alicia Longwell and Karin Roffman Discuss Artist Fairfield Porter and Poet John Ashbery
FRIDAY NIGHTS LIVE!
October 30, 2020, 5 pm - 6 pm
Join Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, in an illustrated live-stream talk related to the exhibition HOUSEBOUND: Fairfield Porter and his Circle of Poets and Painters, with Karin Roffman, author of a biography of poet John Ashbery who was a close friend of Porter’s and frequent guest at the artist’s Southampton home.
The conversation focuses on the many painters and poets who visited Porter and his wife from the 1950s through the ‘70s, and the ways that domestic surroundings can both nurture and reflect artistic choices. Roffman’s deep knowledge of Ashbery’s life and work, including his enduring friendship with Porter, will be the focus of this illuminating talk.
Porter (American, 1907–1975), the poet Anne Porter, and their children moved in 1949 from New York to a rambling 19th-c. captain’s house in Southampton Village. For decades following, the couple’s friends gravitated there for a weekend or an extended stay, chronicling their social mores and shared sensibilities in words and paint. Ashbery was a frequent visitor, along with fellow poets Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler; as well as painters including Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and Jane Wilson. Roffman’s book, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, reveals how Ashbery’s poetry arose in part, from those lifelong friendships with Porter and others who congregated at his home, notably Freilicher, O’Hara, Koch, and Schuyler. The exhibition at the Parrish reveals the reciprocity of inspiration: Ashbery’s typed manuscript of his poem Pyrography is the surface for Rivers’s drawing of the poet at the typewriter.
HOUSEBOUND: FAIRFIELD PORTER AND HIS CIRCLE OF POETS AND PAINTERS
Housebound presents paintings and poems that bring in sharp focus the many connections between the works and the artists who created them. Nearly 40 paintings by Porter, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers will be on view. Poems by Anne Porter and New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler are accessible from SQR codes on the labels of specific works. Paintings by Porter from the late 1940s and ’50s such as Anne Reading to Laurence, 1947, show intimate scenes in the Porter household, while others illustrate direct inspiration of one artist to another, such as Sketch for a Portrait of Jimmy Schuyler, 1962 , and Jane and Elizabeth, 1967, depicting Freilicher and her young daughter. Portraits by artists inspired by their writer friends include Rivers’s lithograph, Untitled (John Ashbery), 1984, and Alex Katz, Untitled (Portrait of Kenneth Koch), c 1970.
About Karin Roffman
Karin Roffman has published essays on John Ashbery and 20th – and 21st– century writers and artists in Raritan, Modern Fiction Studies, Artforum, Rain Taxi, Yale Review and others. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010) won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, English and American Studies at Yale University, where she is creating, John Ashbery’s Nest, a website and virtual tour of Ashbery’s Hudson house in collaboration with Monica Ong Reed and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab. Roffman has previously taught at West Point and Bard College.
Friday Nights at the Parrish are made possible, in part, by Presenting Sponsor:
Additional support provided by Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder.
LIVE-STREAM TALK: Alicia Longwell and Karin Roffman Discuss Artist Fairfield Porter and Poet John Ashbery
FRIDAY NIGHTS LIVE!
October 30, 2020, 5 pm - 6 pm
Join Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, in an illustrated live-stream talk related to the exhibition HOUSEBOUND: Fairfield Porter and his Circle of Poets and Painters, with Karin Roffman, author of a biography of poet John Ashbery who was a close friend of Porter’s and frequent guest at the artist’s Southampton home.
The conversation focuses on the many painters and poets who visited Porter and his wife from the 1950s through the ‘70s, and the ways that domestic surroundings can both nurture and reflect artistic choices. Roffman’s deep knowledge of Ashbery’s life and work, including his enduring friendship with Porter, will be the focus of this illuminating talk.
Porter (American, 1907–1975), the poet Anne Porter, and their children moved in 1949 from New York to a rambling 19th-c. captain’s house in Southampton Village. For decades following, the couple’s friends gravitated there for a weekend or an extended stay, chronicling their social mores and shared sensibilities in words and paint. Ashbery was a frequent visitor, along with fellow poets Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler; as well as painters including Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and Jane Wilson. Roffman’s book, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, reveals how Ashbery’s poetry arose in part, from those lifelong friendships with Porter and others who congregated at his home, notably Freilicher, O’Hara, Koch, and Schuyler. The exhibition at the Parrish reveals the reciprocity of inspiration: Ashbery’s typed manuscript of his poem Pyrography is the surface for Rivers’s drawing of the poet at the typewriter.
HOUSEBOUND: FAIRFIELD PORTER AND HIS CIRCLE OF POETS AND PAINTERS
Housebound presents paintings and poems that bring in sharp focus the many connections between the works and the artists who created them. Nearly 40 paintings by Porter, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers will be on view. Poems by Anne Porter and New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler are accessible from SQR codes on the labels of specific works. Paintings by Porter from the late 1940s and ’50s such as Anne Reading to Laurence, 1947, show intimate scenes in the Porter household, while others illustrate direct inspiration of one artist to another, such as Sketch for a Portrait of Jimmy Schuyler, 1962 , and Jane and Elizabeth, 1967, depicting Freilicher and her young daughter. Portraits by artists inspired by their writer friends include Rivers’s lithograph, Untitled (John Ashbery), 1984, and Alex Katz, Untitled (Portrait of Kenneth Koch), c 1970.
About Karin Roffman
Karin Roffman has published essays on John Ashbery and 20th – and 21st– century writers and artists in Raritan, Modern Fiction Studies, Artforum, Rain Taxi, Yale Review and others. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010) won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, English and American Studies at Yale University, where she is creating, John Ashbery’s Nest, a website and virtual tour of Ashbery’s Hudson house in collaboration with Monica Ong Reed and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab. Roffman has previously taught at West Point and Bard College.
