Do You Know Frank O’Hara? Tessa Zafón-Whalen ’26 Wants to Introduce You

The archives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) won’t open until 1 p.m., so Madeline "Tessa" Zafón-Whalen ’26 has some time to explore. As she strolls the museum’s halls, she takes in works by famous artists, like abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Grace Hartigan, and the “godfather of Pop Art,” Larry Rivers.

Few of her fellow museum patrons, though, would know the name of the man who helped propel these greats onto the world stage: Worcester-County native Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), a poet, art critic, MoMA curator and social connector on the 1950s and 1960s New York City and international art scenes.

Zafón-Whalen has traveled to New York City as part of her Weiss Summer Research project on O’Hara. She is advised by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, who has been conducting years-long research on Worcester-area poets, including O’Hara, through her Mapping Worcester in Poetry (MWiP) project, supported by the College’s Scholarship in Action program.

“As an artist and part of a society of artists, O’Hara was very important —and also under-recognized,” Zafón-Whalen says. “I would argue that his artist friends may not have gotten the recognition they did without him. He died young at age 40, and I believe that if he had lived longer, people would know him better. There is information out there about O'Hara, but it's just not fully synthesized.”

With her new research, Zafón-Whalen hopes to change that.

First-name basis

“There was a moment when ‘Frank O’Hara’ became just ‘Frank’ — Tessa is now on a first-name basis with him,” Sweeney says. “She has read letters from him that possibly no one else has, and has important moments in his life and relationships at her fingertips. She knows more about him than I do at this point. That’s the magic of doing this work with a student.”

Zafón-Whalen may be an expert on O’Hara now, but months before she found herself retracing his steps, O’Hara had been an unknown to her, too.

A double major in English and studio art, Zafón-Whalen connected with Sweeney in spring 2024 when the two met in Sweeney’s office to discuss options for summer research. “Tessa impressed me right away,” says Sweeney, who thought the rising junior would be a great fit to jump in on Sweeney’s MWiP project, a collaboration with the Worcester County Poetry Association that is producing self-guided driving and walking tours tracing the lives of several area poets, along with brochures, scholarly publications and a forthcoming exhibit at the Worcester Historical Museum. (An O'Hara tour can be found here.)

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Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, left, was Zafón-Whalen's advisor for the project: "She knows more about him than I do at this point. That’s the magic of doing this work with a student.”

“When Professor Sweeney described Frank O’Hara, I was immediately intrigued because I am also from Worcester, I am connected with my city, and I have always loved English and art — he combined all of my interests,” Zafón-Whalen says.

O’Hara grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, and attended St. John’s High School in Worcester. He took piano and voice lessons in the city and loved going to the movies at the Loew's Poli Theater, now The Hanover Theatre. In New York City, O’Hara worked his way up from the front desk at the MoMA to become an influential curator. In the 1950s and 1960s, he became the nucleus of a group of surrealist and avant-garde poets, painters, dancers and musicians called the “New York School.”

“I told Tessa, Frank O’Hara was the opposite of Emily Dickinson; he was social, extroverted, gregarious, friendly,” Sweeney says. “If Frank O’Hara was in a room, that room became a salon. He was a great person to have next to you at a dinner party.”

Walking in O’Hara’s footsteps

“The first book Professor Sweeney gave me to read was O’Hara’s 'Lunch Poems,’” Zafón-Whalen says. The book is a small collection that O'Hara wrote while walking around New York City on his lunch break from the MoMA, stopping at typewriter stores to type up the poems on sample machines displayed on the sidewalk. He gave many of the poems away, and some are still surfacing.

“The collection was published by City Lights in 1964, and has never gone out of print, which is unusual for a book of poetry,” Sweeney says. “I gave it to Tessa and she read the whole book within a day.”

“'Lunch Poems’ gives a good insight into O’Hara’s style,” Zafón-Whalen says. “Everything is observational, reflective and immediate.”

In addition to her independent research on O’Hara and his relationships with renowned artists of his time, Zafón-Whalen has focused on completing two self-guided tours mapping O’Hara’s local roots: one in Grafton, where O’Hara grew up, and the other in Worcester, where he was educated and developed his love of the arts. At the Summer Research Symposium in September, she will present “Frank O’Hara: From Grafton, Worcester, and New York, The Figure that Remains,” exploring how the treatment of the human figure in abstract paintings by his friends Rivers and Hartigan may have influenced how O’Hara represents people in his poems.

With their shared Worcester ties, Zafón-Whalen has experienced many moments of deep-felt connection with O’Hara.

“My family is from the Worcester area, tracing back to my great-grandparents,” shares Zafón-Whalen, who grew up in Worcester and graduated from Doherty Memorial High School. “O'Hara's father, Russell, went to Holy Cross at the same time as my great-grandfather. They almost certainly knew each other. There is so much interconnection in Worcester. It’s a large city, but it's such a small world, and everyone is connected through something. I’ve realized just how much Worcester has formed the way that I appreciate or interact with art and literature, and Frank O'Hara was also a product of that.”

The curator behind the scenes

On her research trip to New York City, Zafón-Whalen retraced O’Hara’s stomping grounds. She walked the same streets he strolled on his lunch breaks and browsed the bookshelves of the New York Public Library. At the MoMA archives, she sifted through O’Hara’s professional correspondence and recorded first-hand evidence of just how pivotal the curator was in organizing exhibitions, especially ones in Europe that promoted up-and-coming American painters.

“It was thanks to O’Hara that Jackson Pollock got exhibitions in Europe,” Zafón-Whalen explains. “Historically, Europeans did not view American artists in a good light. Then, in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Americans started making something new — art that was considered ‘respectable’ in the eyes of Europeans.”

Zafón-Whalen also visited the Whitney Museum of American Art because O’Hara often requested pieces from there for exhibitions. “When I was at the Whitney, I saw a Franz Kline work, which was great because O'Hara was very connected with Kline and helped him get his work exhibited in Europe.

“Walking through these museums, I just kept thinking, ‘Frank knew that artist, he helped that other one, he was friends with that one,’” Zafón-Whalen says. “He was committed to always promoting truly good art. O’Hara went to Harvard University and then to the University of Michigan to study English, but he technically had no qualifications to be a curator in the art world. And yet, he was. That's just how in-tune he was, how intuitively skilled. That's the brilliant aspect of him.”

And, she says, he was as much a good friend to these artists as he was a promoter of their talent: “The University of Connecticut has a digital collection of letters from Frank to contemporary American painters, so you can get a clear understanding of the nature of his relationships, on a friend level. I love these letters because he's a wonderful, funny, kind and supportive person, and you can see that in the way that he writes to his friends.

“It has been so satisfying to have this set time to focus on a niche topic that is also interdisciplinary across all the things that I care about,” she says. “In the future, I would love to go into academia and do research. This project makes me even more confident that I would be very happy doing this."