Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets

Experience the first exhibition to bring together the full range of materials that showcase renowned painter Alex Katz’s extensive collaborations with poets. Spanning works created over the past 60 years, Collaborations with Poets includes print portfolios, editioned books, portraits of poets such as Alice Notley and Frank O’Hara, and unique cutouts, all centering on poets and poetry.

Organized by the Poetry Foundation with guidance from the artist and his son, the poet Vincent Katz, and with support from GRAY, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to experience Katz’s deep interest in an art form whose forms and tactics he considered “more stimulating than painting.”

Alex Katz often associated with the Pop Art movement, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954; since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising. 

Over the past five and a half decades, he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions, including a 2022-23 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

All guests over the age of two must wear a mask inside the Poetry Foundation building. Guests over the age of five must show proof of vaccination and booster up to the level to which they are eligible for their age group. Guests over the age of 18 must show ID alongside their proof of vaccination. If you cannot meet these requirements, you will not be granted entry to the event. Please note that some performers may choose to perform without a mask.

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