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.” To learn more about Alex Katz’s long-time collaborative engagement with poets, hear directly from the artist in dialogue with his son, presented by GRAY.

Alex Katz came of age as an artist between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. 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, a 2022-23 survey of works on theatre and dance at Colby College, 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.

Masks are optional, but encouraged. Masks will be available at check-in for those who would like to wear one.