Matthew Ward, who took over the reins of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center a year ago, was born and raised in West Islip and earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in art history from Stony Brook University.
“Before I moved out to Texas, I could never have imagined myself being in Texas — until I married somebody from Texas,” he said during a conversation at the Pollock-Krasner House. They moved in 2021 because his wife was attending the Texas Tech University Physician Assistant Studies program in Midland, home of the Museum of the Southwest.
For the next three years, as the museum’s senior director of curatorial affairs, Mr. Ward organized over 15 art exhibitions, and in the process refined a curatorial approach that he has carried forward to his present position in Springs.
Before it became the Museum of the Southwest, the property was the home of Fred Turner, the region’s first oil magnate. The Turner mansion still exists, but it has been converted into a gallery space whose structure is still historic but the walls are gallery walls.
“On that side of the museum, I focused on curating historical shows and focusing on the history of Southwestern art, and then in the modern contemporary wing, that’s where I did more modern and contemporary shows,” Mr. Ward said. Because there were 12 gallery spaces to work with, he was able to pair historic and modern or contemporary shows at the same time.
One of the former was a show of Frida Kahlo’s personal photograph collection, which had been hidden in La Casa Azul, her birthplace and now the Frida Kahlo Museum, for more than 50 years. That exhibition overlapped with “Loc Huynh: Texanese,” which explored the contemporary artist’s Vietnamese, Chinese, and Texan heritage through a series of self-portraits and vignettes.
“I’ve always liked that juxtaposition of past and present and allowing them to play off of each other,” Mr. Ward said. “A living artist’s work can perhaps be contextualized by a better-known deceased artist, and they can complement one another.”
His approach at the Museum of the Southwest is reflected in his vision for the Pollock-Krasner House and its current exhibition, “Memory Image,” which pairs the work of Elaine de Kooning with that of Eric Haze, an established contemporary artist who more than 50 years ago sat with his sister for a portrait painted by de Kooning.
“We have this historical context, and it is very important to maintain that history, to educate on that history, and celebrate that history. But I also want to bring into the historic space modern and contemporary works that can create fun conversations and be changed by the very specific context of the venue and allow us to look at the venue in a new way.”
Noting that the house is the most specific space he has worked in, he said, “This is a home and this is a work space. So when we do shows here I like to include narrative about the artist as a human being, information about where they make their work, artifacts from that artist’s home.”
“Han Qin: Little Images,” a show from last year, invited the artist, who teaches at Stony Brook, to respond to Lee Krasner’s “Little Image” series of paintings from 1946 to 1950. The show included Ms. Qin’s drawings, videos, sculptures, personal artifacts, and site-responsive installations.
The idea of home is integral to the venue’s next exhibition, set to open on May 1. “At Home With Rosalyn Drexler,” co-curated by Rachel Silverbloom, a philosophy professor at Vassar College, will focus on the 98-year-old artist’s relationship with and treatment of domestic spaces throughout her career.
“There is something specific and important about how a woman artist, especially in midcentury America, works out of the home and how that domestic space affects their work. In Rosalyn’s case, she has a very particular voice when it comes to describing the domestic space. Home in her work is not always a place of warmth and peace and safety. Her domestic spaces can be tense, can be frenetic, can be pregnant with the threat of violence.”
Indeed, said Mr. Ward, in the early ‘50s, married to Sherman Drexler, an artist, she was feeling suffocated by her domestic space. Her response: She took to the road as a professional wrestler. Unbound by style, Ms. Drexler is a painter, a novelist, a screenwriter, an actress, and a singer, as well as a wrestler.
Concurrent with the exhibition, Hagfish Press will rerelease Ms. Drexler’s 1972 novel, “To Smithereens,” which was both a scathing critique of the art world and a chronicle of her life in professional wrestling. The exhibition will include one of her wrestling paintings.
Mr. Ward’s catalog essay for the show will focus on her foray into wrestling as a form of escapism. “There’s this very real violence between men and women in the domestic sphere that she shows in her paintings, but then her paintings of women wrestling one another in the ring, professional wrestling is of course a cooperative effort. Both competitors are actually protecting one another and creating the artwork together.”
The second summer exhibition is “Stones,” a series of 12 lithographs by Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers. Begun in 1957 and completed in 1960, the series was the first major project of Tatyana Grosman’s Universal Limited Art Editions, a printmaking studio that drew many important American artists to western Suffolk County. Both O’Hara and Rivers were very much a part of the East End and closely associated with Pollock and Krasner. In fact, O’Hara organized the first Pollock retrospective but was killed before the show went up.
“Stones” has an unusual contemporary component: Emily Hopkins, an electroacoustic harpist. Early last year, a series of short musical sets were played in the property’s studio by several Long Island musicians. Although the studio — the site of Pollock’s now-famous paint-spattered floor — will never show the work of another visual artist, “Atmospherically it is a perfect space for ephemeral art, like music,” Mr. Ward said.
He saw parallels between Ms. Hopkins and Pollock and Krasner, with both her incorporation of electronic elements and her predilection for improvisation-defying expectations for such a classical instrument. He invited Ms. Hopkins to be the house’s first artist in residence.
“I wanted to do a music residency because music was very important to Jackson and Lee. And because we don’t have studio space for painters, it’s a way for us to host recitals and musical events.”
Ms. Hopkins’s residency will culminate this summer with her composition of pieces of music for each lithograph. Those will be released as an album, and the exhibition will have a listening component that will let visitors hear a piece of each song. In addition, Mr. Ward is hoping to reproduce the series of lithographs in a small booklet that can be an album insert.
“That project is a good encapsulation of the type of projects I’m hoping to continue to do here — projects that marry the regionally historical with the contemporary, in that way playing off one another in dialogue.”
Among Mr. Ward’s other initiatives is “Inner Rhythm,” a series of podcasts about the creative process featuring long-form conversations with visual artists and musicians, as well as some of the studio music sessions. The most recent featured Stephanie Dinkins, a Stony Brook University professor, on the intersection of art and A.I.
That reflects another initiative, strengthening the ties among the Pollock-Krasner House, Stony Brook University’s art department, and Stony Brook Southampton, where the Pollock-Krasner study center and library are located. In addition, the study center’s archivist, Diane Holliday, is managing the Avram Gallery there, where Mr. Ward has organized a show of abstract art from the East End that also mixes the historical with the contemporary.
Interestingly, Mr. Ward’s undergraduate focus was on commercial art and illustration. While in graduate school and working as an intern at the Willem de Kooning Foundation, he became especially interested in de Kooning’s early career as an illustrator and commercial artist.
His doctoral thesis, which focused on de Kooning’s first five years in this country, will be published as an essay by the Art Institute of Chicago in its catalog for a 2026 de Kooning drawing exhibition.
