Celebrating the grand opening of Hauser & Wirth Palo Alto’s new bookshop, and coinciding with our inaugural exhibition, ‘Calder | O’Keeffe,’ please join us during our first day-long program of talks, readings, performances, books, music and food, for an afternoon of readings with President of The Guston Foundation and Philip Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and legendary Bay Area Poet, and Guston’s friend, Clark Coolidge.
Musa Mayer will read selections from Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ recent release, ‘Life with P.: Journals, 1966–1976,' by Musa McKim Guston, which brings together McKim’s journals and poetry, drawing an intimate and candid portrait of her life as a writer and her marriage to the esteemed painter Philip Guston. The book spans a critical decade in the couple’s marriage as well as a period of profound change and productivity in Guston’s artistic practice that saw the creation of some of his most iconic late works. McKim’s writings capture daily life at their home and studio in Woodstock, trips to New York City, travels abroad to Mexico and Italy, and time spent at various artist residencies. A rich collection of artworks and archival images documents the couple’s domestic and social lives and the fellow artists and writers who made up their world. Alongside her introduction, notes by their daughter Musa Mayer provide valuable context to her mother’s writings. Complementing Mayer’s own celebrated memoir 'Night Studio' (1988), 'Life with P.' is an extraordinary window into McKim’s singular experience of the world.
Poet Clark Coolidge, a close friend and collaborator of the late Philip Guston, will read a selection of poems written by Musa McKim Guston as well as his own poems in response to Philip Guston's paintings.
A selection of Guston and Coolidge publications will be available for purchase during the event, and both Musa Mayer and Clark Coolidge will sign books after their readings.
This event is free, however, reservations are recommended. Click here to register.
About Philip Guston
Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) is one of the great luminaries of twentieth-century art. His commitment to producing work from genuine emotion and lived experience ensures its enduring impact. Guston’s legendary career spanned half a century, from 1930 to 1980. His paintings—particularly the liberated and instinctual forms of his late work—continue to exert a powerful influence on younger generations of contemporary painters. For an in-depth overview of his career, click here.
About Musa Mayer
In 2015, Musa Mayer retired from a 25 career as a cancer advocate to focus full time on her father’s legacy, working with Hauser & Wirth to curate Guston exhibitions in New York, London, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Among other books and catalogues, a monograph she edited on the Nixon drawings won an international art prize in 2017.
In addition to managing the Guston estate, Mayer is President of The Guston Foundation, whose legacy projects include the website PhilipGuston.org, built around a 50-year chronology of Guston’s career and the catalogues raisonné of his paintings, drawings and archives that detail all exhibitions, bibliography and holdings in museum collections around the world. In 2022, Mayer promised her extensive personal collection of her father’s work to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when the new Modern and Contemporary Wing opens at the end of the decade.
About Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is a poet, writer, and lifelong drummer whose work has explored the rhythms, sounds, and qualities of language. Born in Providence in 1939, he became part of the New York and West Coast experimental poetry scenes, moving to San Francisco in the 1960s and playing drums with David Meltzer’s influential band, Serpent Power. He later produced experimental poetry programming for Berkeley’s KPFA. Coolidge has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and has collaborated with artists and musicians throughout his career. He edited ‘Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations’ and collaborated with Guston on 43 poem pictures which were later published in ‘Baffling Means: Writings/Drawings’.
About 'Life With P.: Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964 - 1978'
‘Life with P’ illuminates an intimate and rarely observed facet of Philip Guston’s art. While this groundbreaking 20th century master is best known for raw, painterly explorations of sociopolitical power and sobering inspections of human nature, this exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s 18th Street space showcases a selection of Guston’s more intimate paintings and works on paper in which Guston ruminates on his marriage to poet Musa McKim and their lives together in Woodstock. The works on view will include a collection of Guston’s ‘Poem Pictures,’ drawings that respond to his wife’s poetry, as well as three large-scale figurative paintings that have never before been exhibited. ‘Life with P’ coincides with the release of a new book from Hauser & Wirth Publishers by the same name, an illustrated compilation of Musa McKim’s previously unpublished journals from 1966 – 1976, contextualized by the couple’s daughter, Musa Mayer.
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