Geoffrey Dorfman In Conversation with Annalyn Swan
On Wednesday, October 28th, at 6pm, join Geoffrey Dorfman and Annalyn Swan for a discussion and signing of Dorfman’s new biography, Milton Resnick: Painter in the Age of Painting.
Milton Resnick: Painter in the Age of Painting is the first biography to explore Resnick’s life and work, and his place among the New York City artists who became known as the abstract expressionists. Resnick was a founding member of The Club, an artists’ group that included Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Herman Cherry, and Ad Reinhardt. The intimate and discerning biography follows Resnick’s life from his birth in Bratzlav, Ukraine, in 1917, through his experiences during the second World War, his time in Paris, and his eight decades in New York.
Geoffrey Dorfman: Geoffrey Dorfman is an artist and writer on cultural history with a focus on modernism and modern art. Dorfman knew Resnick for over 35 years and had many lively discussions and arguments with Resnick about his paintings and the predicament of the artist in postwar American society.
Annalyn Swan: is the author, with Mark Stevens, of de Kooning: An American Master and Francis Bacon: Revelations. Their biography of de Kooning won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. A graduate of Princeton University and of King’s College, Cambridge, which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship, Swan is the former art editor of Newsweek. She teaches biography and memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center and at Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English.
New York New Music Ensemble - November Performance
The New York New Music Ensemble will be performing at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation on Monday, November 2nd, 2026.
Since 1976, the New York New Music Ensemble (NYNME) has been on a mission to push the boundaries of contemporary chamber music. We’ve commissioned, performed, and recorded some of the most groundbreaking composers of our time—often before the world knew their names. Our concerts have been thrilling, unexpected, sometimes controversial—but always unforgettable.
Jared Redmond, Piano — Morton Feldman: Time as Canvas
This fall, the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation celebrates the centennial of Morton Feldman, one of the most visionary and influential composers associated with the New York School. Feldman lived and worked on the Lower East Side as part of the same close-knit artistic community as many Abstract Expressionist painters. His friendships, conversations, and artistic exchanges with these figures profoundly shaped the way he thought about gesture, sound, time, and memory.
For the first concert in this centennial series, acclaimed composer-pianist Jared Redmond will perform two works for solo piano by Feldman: the concise, unsettled Intersection 3 (1953), written in graphic notation, and the expansive, meditative Triadic Memories (1981)—traditional in notation, yet radical in experience.
Both works emerged from Feldman’s sustained engagement with painting. As he famously stated, “I learned more from painters than I learned from composers.” In Intersection 3, Feldman employs a graphic score composed of boxes of numbers and patterns, leaving considerable freedom to the pianist. His approach parallels Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” method, which Feldman translated into music through his concept of the “time-canvas.” Nearly three decades later, at a conference held the year after he composed Triadic Memories, Feldman revealed that the use of the sustaining pedal in the piece had been inspired by Cy Twombly’s application of gesso.
Heard together, these two works trace Feldman’s journey from the graphic experimentation of the 1950s to the suspended, labyrinthine sound world of his music in the 1980s. Although Triadic Memories may appear more “measured” through its use of traditional notation, Feldman’s inquiry has shifted from the explicitly visual experimentation of his early scores toward a more gestural, and perhaps more abstract exploration of granularity, in which the smallest variations of sound, duration, resonance, and touch acquire expressive significance.
Three Material Views Opening
In Three Material Views, curator John Yau unites paintings by Eric Aho, Stanley Lewis, and Ying Li—three contemporary artists placed in retrospective dialogue with nineteenth-century American landscapist Albert Pinkham Ryder—that explore the specific materiality of their medium just as they examine its transportive qualities. Ryder’s introspection finds mirrors in the organic, twinkling vistas of Aho’s Fireflies series; Lewis’s fragmented, architectural attention to individual facets of quotidian life under the weathering passage of time; and Li’s dynamic “world of pigment and light” built up in swirling, overlapping strokes of paint applied with various implements.
This show is located on the first floor of the Foundation. An exhibition catalogue including John Yau’s essay is available to purchase on site and on the Foundation’s website.
Milton Resnick: Earth, Elephant, New Bride Opening
Milton Resnick: Earth, Elephant, New Bride brings together three of Resnick’s most significant mid-career paintings—New Bride (1963) on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Earth (1976) on loan from MoMA, and Elephant (1979)—for the first time. Though Resnick was a dedicated abstractionist rather than a landscape painter, these works establish their own microcosmic dimensions of reality: acting as overall steady-state textures just as they present entire worlds in and of themselves.
Milton Resnick: Earth, Elephant, New Bride is located on the second floor of the Foundation. An exhibition catalogue including an essay by Geoffrey Dorfman—painter, critic, student/friend of Milton Resnick, and Vice President of the Foundation board—is available to purchase on site and on the Foundation’s website.
Celebration of James Schuyler's Poetry
Please join us to mark the closing of Real as Paint on Canvas: James Schuyler and a Few of his Painter Friends with a reading curated by Ann Stephenson on Thursday, July 9th at 6:30pm. Tickets are $10 each, available to purchase at the door. No advanced reservations.
A celebration of James Schuyler’s poetry with:
Elaine Equi
Ben Estes
Nathan Kernan
Wayne Koestenbaum
& a recording by Peter Gizzi
This exhibition was originally organized in conjunction with the publication of Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler.
Elaine Equi’s latest book is Out of the Blank from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and The Intangibles. Widely published, her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Poetry, The New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, New American Writing, The Paris Review, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, and several editions of BestAmerican Poetry. She has taught in many creative writing programs including those at New York University, City College of New York, and The New School.
Ben Estes is the author of the poetry collections ABC Moonlight;Illustrated Games of Patience; and Simple Machines, which will be published in 2027. Ben has also edited Together & Alone: The Photographs of Karlheinz Weinberger; The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield; and the poetry anthology On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing. With Alan Felsenthal, he edited A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind, the Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton. He is currently working on assembling an anthology of John Cage's writings through Henry David Thoreau and a collection of James Schuyler's photographs, both will also to be published in 2027. In 2024, Dia commissioned Ben to write Clear Air, a long poem for 4 readers, to be performed at Dia:Beacon. Ben has shown his paintings at Paula Cooper Gallery, Headstone Gallery, Kobo Chika, and Bad Water, among others.
Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy, Now It’s Dark, Archeophonics, and In Defense of Nothing, all from Wesleyan. He lives in Holyoke, MA.
Nathan Kernan is a writer who lives in New York and in Salisbury CT. He edited The Diary of James Schuyler which was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1997, and has published numerous art reviews, catalogue essays and monographs, as well as poetry. Poems, his collaboration with painter Joan Mitchell, was published by Tyler Graphics in 1992. A chapbook, Lunch, was published by Pressed Wafer in 2007. A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, published in 2025 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is his first biography. Kernan is also a co-founder and board president of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, an exhibition space for painting in lower Manhattan.
Wayne Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. His many books span poetry, essays, biography, and fiction. His first novel in more than twenty years, My Lover, the Rabbi, was recently published by FSG Originals. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A widely shown painter, he released his first piano/vocal album, Lounge Act, in 2017. He lives in New York.