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Charlotte Park (American, 1918–2010). Untitled, c. 1960, gouache on paper, 22 1/2 x 22 1/2 in. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y. Gift of the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation. 2017.13.87.
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Charlotte Park (American, 1918–2010). Untitled, c. 1955–60, gouache on paper, 22 1/2 x 22 1/2 in. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y. Museum Purchase, Audrey McMahon Fund. 2002.20.
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Charlotte Park (American, 1918–2010). Initiation, c. 1955, oil on canvas, 48 1/2 x 36 in. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y. Gift of the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation. 2017.13.83.
Charlotte Park: The Life of Forms in Color is a survey comprising of 60–80 paintings and works on paper, drawn exclusively from the Parrish’s collection and the 2017 gift of works to the Parrish by the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation. Overshadowed by the attention given to the work of her husband, James Brooks, Park kept a fairly low profile over the course of her career while painting some of the strongest and most brilliantly colored canvases of her time. Color and form, often related to the living environment surrounding the studio she shared with her husband, were strong and constant forces in her work.
Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1918, Park studied from 1935 to 1939 at the Yale School of Fine Art. After moving to New York, Brooks and Park soon became part of the circle of Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner. They rented a studio space that had been occupied by Pollock and joined Pollock and Krasner, along with other artists working in establishing studios on Long Island. They stayed first in Montauk, but after their studio was destroyed by a hurricane in 1954, they moved to a cottage in Springs, East Hampton, which became their full-time residence.
The exhibition follows Park’s abstractions of color and form inspired by organic life from her diffident embraces of color in the early to mid-1950s through her assertive yet playful compositions of the 1980s.
Charlotte Park: The Life of Forms in Color is curated by Klaus Ottmann, Robert Lehman Curator with additional support from Kaitlin Halloran, Assistant Curator and Publications Coordinator.
Exhibition Support
Charlotte Park: The Life of Forms in Color is made possible thanks to the generous support of the James and Charlotte Brooks Fund.
The Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.
