E.E. Cummings artwork rescued from closet to go on display at SUNY Brockport

After spending nearly 40 years in a closet, 51 works of art by E.E. Cummings have been restored and will go on display at SUNY Brockport. The Stylus reports that the entire collection, a total of 72 works, was donated to the school in the late 1970s but even many on campus at the time had no idea they were there. Rediscovered in 2004, their deteriorating condition posed a challenge to the school and conservators with "the myriad of materials Cummings used to create his art," according to Tim Massey, director of the Tower Fine Arts Gallery.

Now that the public can finally see the works in the Tower's exhibition E.E. Cummings: Painter and Poet, Brockport has taken steps to ensure the art remains accessible and is kept in good repair, perhaps regularly featuring them in a rotating display at another academic building or helping them go on tour or on loan to other museums. No one seems to know why Cummings' art ended up at Brockport in the first place, but the school is finally making a permanent home for it.

Stuart Soloway, the art gallery manager, said an old friend of Cummings donated the works.

"[They] were given to the college by Cummings' longtime friend and patron, James Sibley Watson Jr.," he said. "Watson was a classmate of Cummings' at Harvard and a publisher of The Dial, a literary and arts magazine that published some of Cummings' earlier works.

The Hildegarde Lasell Watson Collection of Artworks by E.E. Cummings has been described as biographically and aesthetically important by several Cummings experts."