In the Painting Room: Photographs by Midge Wattles, Poems by Milton Resnick

From 1976 until his death in 2004, Milton Resnick lived and worked on three floors of a deconsecrated synagogue at 87 Eldridge Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There, in the former sanctuary on the second floor, he painted the large, heavily impastoed works of the 1980s and 90s he is known for. In the last several years of his life, however, painful arthritis made large scale work impossible and he retreated to a small studio next to his sleeping area on the third floor mezzanine, where he continued to paint works on paper until the day he died.

The building remained much as he had left it for several years following Milton’s death. After his wife Pat Passlof died in 2011, the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation was established, and preparations began toward renovating the building as an exhibition space for painting. Wanting a record of the building before it was changed irrevocably, in 2013 the Foundation hired photographer Midge Wattles to document the building as it then was.

Milton was also a poet, and left many unpublished poems, which the Foundation is gradually organizing for publication. As part of this process, the Foundation Manager, Alex Chapin, was recently struck by a group of short poems Milton wrote on a nearly daily basis in 2002, forming a sort of “diary.” The poems, among other things, reflect his determination to keep working in the face of physical pain while evoking the spaces of his building and the immediate, changing neighbor- hood he had become more or less confined to.

We are excited to include an initial selection of the poems in a small book, which has been published to accompany the exhibition of Midge’s photographs at the Foundation.

14 photographs
14 poems
Hardcover
Edition of 300