“Friday Nights Live!” To Cover Poet James Schuyler And Painter Fairfield Porter

The Parrish Art Museum’s latest Friday Nights Live! will delve into the long-term friendship between poet James Schuyler and painter Fairfield Porter. The live stream discussion will feature Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, and Nathan Kernan, who is currently penning a biography about Schuyler, which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The virtual chat will take place on Friday, January 29 at 5:00 p.m.

“I’m delighted that Nathan Kernan will join me for this conversation about painters and poets and the ways in which their domestic surroundings can both nurture and reflect their artistic choices,” said Longwell. “His deep knowledge of James Schuyler’s life and work, including his enduring friendship with Porter, will be the focus of this illuminating talk.”

The Museum’s Housebound: Fairfield Porter and his Circle of Poets and Painters exhibition highlights nearly 40 paintings by Porter, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers, as well as poems by Anne Porter, Josh Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Schuyler. Fairfield, along with his wife, poet Anne Porter, and their children, moved to a 19th-c. captain’s house in Southampton Village in 1949. At their East End abode, the couple welcomed numerous prominent guests for a weekend or an extended trip, which was often captured in word or paint. Visitors included Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, Schuyler, Dash, Freilicher, Katz, Rivers, and Jane Wilson.

Kernan is the editor of The Diary of James Schuyler (Black Sparrow Press, 1997). During Friday Nights Live!, he will speak to the duo’s long lasting friendship. Schuyler, a poet, playwright, and novelist, was the youngest and final member of the New York School of Poets, which included O’Hara, Ashbery, and Koch.

There is no fee to watch the live stream. Pre-event registration is required.

While the Parrish Art Museum has temporarily closed its Museum galleries, with plans to reopen in early spring, the Parrish’s Meadow and Field of Dreams remain open and free to visit.

For more information, visit parrishart.org.