Patti Smith salutes photographer Robert Frank

Patti Smith: A Salute to Robert Frank, Artist and Friend

Patti Smith, Jesse Smith and guests

Saturday, October 17 -- 7pm
Metropolitan Museum of Art (Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium)

I keep trying to figure out what it means to be American. When I look in myself I see Abyssinia, nineteenth-century France, but I can’t recognize what makes me American. I think about Robert Frank’s photographs—broke down jukeboxes in Gallup, New Mexico, swaying hips and spurs, ponytails and syphilitic cowpokes, hash slingers, the glowing black tarp of US 285 and the Hoboken stars and stripes.

I think about a red, white and blue rag
I wrap around my head.
Maybe it’s nothing material; maybe it’s just being free.

Freedom is a waterfall, is pacing linoleum till dawn,
the right to write the wrong words.
And I done plenty of that...

notebook, April 1971

Tickets ($40) by phone only: 212-570-3949

Met Museum exhibition: Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans (September 22, 2009 to January 3, 2010)

October 4 events related to this exhibition