Join us for an evening at MoMA to honor the poet and artist Dorothea Tanning. Poets Richard Howard, J.D. McClatchy, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mark Strand, Rosanna Warren, and C.D. Wright, along with Chief MoMA curator Ann Temkin, will read selections of Tanning's poetry and discuss her work and fascinating life.

Dorothea Tanning began working as a painter in New York, after discovering Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. As she recounts in her memoirs, when the famed German artist Max Ernst visited her studio in 1942, they played chess, fell in love, and embarked on a life together that soon took them to Sedona, Arizona, and later to Paris and provincial France. She married Ernst in 1946 in a double wedding with artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet Browner. After Ernst's death in 1976, Tanning returned to New York City, where she has lived ever since. She is the author of the poetry collection, A Table of Content (2004); two memoirs, Birthday (1986) and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (2001); and a novel, Chasm (2004). Her poems appear regularly in The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. Her paintings and sculptures are included in major museum collections such as the Tate Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée de la Ville de Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Chicago Art Institute, among others.