I chose the title of this two-part blog post to pay homage to one of my all-time favorite poems, "Why I Am Not a Painter," by Frank O'Hara, in which he describes creating a series of poems he called Oranges during the same weeks his friend Mike Goldberg worked on a painting called Sardines. I love O'Hara's humor, his humility, his keen observation of himself and everything around him. In 1983 I was working as a graphic artist at the University of Connecticut, where I designed publicity and educational materials for an exhibition entitled Art with the Touch of Poet at the William Benton Museum of Art on campus. |
Prior to his tragic death in 1966 at the age of 40, Frank O'Hara was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a central figure in what is known as the New York School. The exhibition at the Benton brought together the work of 33 of O'Hara's artist friends, while an exhibit of his writing ran concurrently at the campus library, along with accompanying films, talks, and readings by writers in O'Hara's circle. In order to produce the pieces for the Benton, I had to make photographic facsimiles of some of O'Hara's handwritten poems. I can still picture the pale pencil scribbles and cross-outs on the yellowed, flimsy paper I handled day after day. I was a budding poet at the time and holding O'Hara's original work was thrilling.
When I wrote Part 1 of this blog entry about my friend Susan Christian selling her painting after my words had caught someone's eye, I thought about co-creation, about serendipity. I emailed Susan to tell her my Frank O'Hara story and share his poem. She emailed back a simple reply: "I knew Mike Goldberg." |