Join art historian Dr Matthew Holman for this book launch and in conversation with Dr Lucy Bradnock to celebrate the release of Frank O’Hara & MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ‘Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet’. However, in the half a century since, O’Hara’s fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, and Joan Mitchell, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, the book reveals the impact O’Hara’s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself.
The book focuses on his travelling exhibitions for MoMA’s International Program, a vehicle for soft power during the fraught years of the cultural Cold War, exposing him to new art, artists, and cities, while developing important transnational networks far from New York, from São Paulo to Venice, Zagreb to Otterlo.
Matthew Holman is Lecturer in Literature and Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire. He was previously the Terra Foundation for American Art Fellow at The Courtauld and has held postdoctoral or research fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Critical Quarterly, Essays and Studies, The Journal of Modern Literature, Textual Practice, and Women’s Studies. Frank O’Hara & MoMA is his first full-length book.
Dr Lucy Bradnock is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art and Dean for Research at The Courtauld.
Professor David Peters Corbett is Professor of American Art at The Courtauld.
Organised by Professor Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art, The Courtauld, and Professor David Peters Corbett.
