Frank O’Hara: Poet-Curator

To celebrate the launch of Frank O’Hara and MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator, Matthew Holman examines O’Hara’s curatorial work for the Museum of Modern Art’s International Program, an overlooked aspect of his career in which he got his hands dirty in Cold War cultural politics and approached exhibitions as elegies for recently-deceased friends, Franz Kline and David Smith.

rank O’Hara’s career at the Museum of Modern Art represents a crucial intersection between postwar American poetry and the institutional promotion of modern art. Employed at MoMA from 1951 until his death in 1966, O’Hara contributed significantly to the museum’s exhibition strategies and its International Program, positioning him within a much-contested project of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Although O’Hara is primarily remembered as a poet of the New York School, his curatorship demonstrates how his literary and artistic commitments converged in a professional context. Importantly, O’Hara’s exhibitions often carried an elegiac quality, which will be the focus of this lecture. He approached curation not only as a mode of cultural presentation but also as a form of commemoration, most powerfully in his memorial retrospectives of friends Franz Kline and David Smith. These projects reveal his conviction that exhibitions could serve as public elegies: an intimate address on their subjects’ legacies while mourning their personal loss.

Bio:

Matthew Holman is a writer based in London. After completing a PhD in American cultural history at University College London, he is now Lecturer in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. Matthew has held fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian, the Courtauld Institute, and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. He has contributed many essays for artist monographs and exhibition catalogues, including for the Whitechapel Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His academic work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Modern Literature, Critical Quarterly, Textual Practice, The Oxford Art Journal, and Essays and Studies. Frank O'Hara and MoMA is his first full-length book.