HistoricSiteMarkers
Postwar & Contemporary

Frank O'Hara

New York, New York, New York

Marker Inscription

Frank O'Hara 1926-1966 While living here in 1957-59, the poet, critic, and curator wrote a monograph about artist Jackson Pollock. His poems dealt with urban themes in an expressionist style analogous to Pollock's action paintings.

Erected by Historic Landmarks Preservation Center

The Story

While living here in 1957–59, the poet, critic, and museum curator Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) wrote a monograph on the painter Jackson Pollock. His breezy, urban poems shared the spontaneous, expressionist energy of Pollock's action paintings, and he became a central voice of the New York School that fused poetry and postwar abstract art.

Why it matters

O'Hara embodies the mid-century moment when New York became the capital of the art world, blurring the lines between poetry and painting.

Plan your visit

Nearby

Make a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.

Museums & culture

Attractions

Food & drink

Places to stay

Places data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change — call ahead.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Frank O'Hara
  • · Jackson Pollock

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Beatrix Farrand

New York, NY

The pioneering landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) lived here from birth in 1872 until 1913. Over some 192 commissions she shaped the East Garden of the White House, the celebrated grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, and the Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and served for decades as landscape consultant to the Pierpont Morgan Library. A niece of the writer Edith Wharton, she was among the few women to lead the young profession of landscape architecture.

Dawn Powell

New York, NY

From 1931 to 1942 the novelist and diarist Dawn Powell lived at this Greenwich Village address, turning out sharp comic novels like Turn, Magic Wheel and A Time to Be Born. An Ohio transplant, she made a career of skewering both small-town Midwestern life and the glittering ambitions of New York. Nearly forgotten at her death in 1965, Powell found an ardent new readership in the 1990s.

Joseph Papp

New York, NY

In postwar New York, Joseph Papp built an American theater empire from a radical idea: that Shakespeare belonged to everyone, for free. Beginning in Central Park in 1954 and founding The Public Theater in 1967, he championed hundreds of productions and made a downtown home for new and diverse voices in the American stage. He lived at this address during the height of that work, from 1973 until his death in 1991.

E. E. Cummings

New York, NY

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), the poet and painter who made expressive art out of commas, parentheses, and lower-case letters, spent the last forty years of his life at this address. He once described himself as 'an author of pictures, a draughtsman of words,' capturing the way his verse and his visual art fed one another.