Musa McKim

Writing career After her painting career, McKim wrote poetry; her work was published in small literary journals, including the experimental poetry journal Locus Solus. In 1982, her poetry was published alongside Guston's artwork in the Summer edition of The Harvard Advocate. In 1994, a posthumous collection of McKim's poetry, 'Alone with the Moon', was published with an introduction by U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz.

In 1930, she met her future husband, abstract expressionist New York School painter Philip Guston (then Phillip Goldstein) while attending the Otis Art Institute. She later left the institute and returned to Panama. She sent a letter to the Stanley Rose Book Shop, a Hollywood gathering place of artists, inquiring as to the address of Phillip Goldstein. Fellow painter Herman Cherry gave the letter to Goldstein, he replied, and McKim returned to Los Angeles to live with him soon after. He changed his name to Philip Guston in 1935, and in 1936, at the urging of Jackson Pollock, whom Philip met and befriended while attending Manual Arts High School, he and Musa moved to New York City. They married on February 4, 1937, in New York City Hall. The ceremony was witnessed by Sande McCoy, Pollock's half-brother. In 1940, they moved to the artist colony of Woodstock, New York. The next year, in the fall of 1941, Philip accepted a position as artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Their daughter, Musa Jane Guston, was born there in 1943. Later, in 1945, Philip accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1947, the family returned to New York, living in the Byrdcliffe Colony; they settled in nearby Woodstock once again in 1948. In 1949, following a brief stay in Rome, Musa and Philip Guston began commuting between Woodstock and New York City, where the latter opened a studio. In 1967, they left New York City to live permanently in Woodstock. In October 1970, they moved to Rome, after Philip's recent gallery show received severe criticism. They lived at the American Academy in Rome while Philip added works to his gallery, until May 1971, when they returned to New York. Philip died on June 7, 1980. Musa lived in Woodstock for the remainder of her life, dying on March 30, 1992, aged 83, in Kingston.