CURATOR’S TALK: ALICIA LONGWELL ON FAIRFIELD PORTER

Published 2020-05-15
In a live illustrated talk, Fairfield Porter and Friends—In Their Own Words, Chief Curator Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., discusses the artists and writers in Porter’s life.

Fairfield Porter and his family moved from New York to Southampton in 1949, to a rambling 19th-c. house captain’s house on South Main Street that would soon become the center of a rarefied world. Friends from the city—a roster of emerging painters and poets, critics and filmmakers–were drawn to the little village by the sea and to the life that Porter and his wife Anne, a poet in her own right, created. Painters Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Jane Wilson, Robert Dash, and Rackstraw Downes and poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch all were drawn to the house where “. . . down at the end of the street there is an ocean,” as Anne Porter once wrote in a poem.

Images from the Parrish’s extensive collection of works by Porter and his circle will be explored using the painters’ own words and those of their poet friends, all of whom wrote widely about art.

Live Q&A follows.

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