View Pat Passlof installations at The Lab
Pat Passlof (August 5, 1928 – November 13, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter.
Passlof was born in Georgia in 1928 and grew up in New York City, attending Queens College. In the summer of 1948, she studied painting with Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College and continued to study with him privately after they returned to New York. That fall, De Kooning introduced her to Milton Resnick. She and Resnick began to live together in the mid-1950s and married in 1962.
Passlof was an integral member of the art scene in New York for six decades; her life, career, and writing intersecting with major touchstones: from “The Club” and the cooperatives on Tenth Street, to the famed Green Gallery, the feminist art movement, to generations of students at the City University of New York. Passlof’s earliest work utilized the kinds of biomorphic forms explored also by de Kooning and Gorky; as well as the existentialist ideology which informed Abstract Expressionism. However, Passlof was always very individualistic and her work was constantly varied in terms of touch, form, and palette. She was never content to repeat herself.
In 1949, Passlof helped renovate the Eighth Street loft, which was the first location of “The (Artists’) Club,” attending every talk and panel. She considers this the basis of her art education, although she did complete her BFA at Cranbrook in 1951, before returning to her loft on Tenth Street. Noticing that many of her peers rarely spoke when they came to the Club, she decided to organize an alternative “Wednesday Night Club,” envisioning it as a kind of “junior club.” The Wednesday evening sessions quickly became popular, leading the old guard to squelch it for fear of competition. In 1956, Passlof helped found the March Gallery, where she had two exhibitions and helped organize many shows of other artists, including Mark di Suvero’s first exhibition. She designed collections of artists’ poetry, called Pandemonium.