The Trustees of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation will be a largely traditional exhibition space upon its opening in February 2018. Housed in Milton Resnick’s former studio building on Eldridge Street, the Foundation will exhibit paintings on canvas and paper by Resnick, his wife Pat Passlof, and other mature painters working out of the Abstract Expressionist tradition, broadly defined. The emphasis will be placed squarely on the one-to-one confrontation with painting itself.

That said, the physical constraints and emotional resonance of the building—which was first a tenement and then a synagogue before becoming Resnick’s studio—make it far from a typical white cube gallery space. In addition, our mandate to exhibit paintings by “mature” rather than young artists might also be seen as an alternate viewpoint to that of many other small non-profit spaces.

In May 2014, the Foundation placed a choice selection of Resnick paintings on display in Mana’s first and sixth floor galleries. At some 11,000 square feet, it proved to be the largest exhibition of Resnick’s work ever on the East coast of the United States. Reviewed in the New York Times, the exhibition was a most welcome opportunity to keep Resnick’s work in the public eye in the interval that continues to precede the opening of our own building.

Mana had to first exist as an idea, and so it will be with us at Eldridge Street next year. All alternative exhibition spaces—if they’re worth talking about at all—attempt to function in an idealistic mental space, where direct communion with the work of art is paramount.