John Ashbery collects
Subtitle: poet among things ; Co-curated by Adam Fitzgerald, Emily Skillings and Loretta Howard Gallery ; With installation drawings by Matther Thurber
Contributors: Ashbery, John, 1927- collector; Ashbery, John, 1927-; Perl, Jed; Fitzgerald, Adam, curator; Skillings, Emily, curator; Thurber, Matthew, artist; Loretta Howard Gallery
Publisher: Loretta Howard Gallery
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 20
Subjects: Art collections; Exhibitions; Art; Private collections
Notes: Catalog of an exhibition held at the Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, September 12-November 2, 2013.

"Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present John Ashbery Collects, an immersive multi-media gallery experience showcasing a selection of things that inform Ashbery’s sensibility as well as his work as a poet, visual artist, collaborator, art critic and collector. Co-curated by Adam Fitzgerald and Emily Skillings and Loretta Howard Gallery, John Ashbery Collects explores the poet’s lifelong interest in collecting through the medium of his late-19th century house in Hudson, NY, a carefully composed collage-environment constructed over thirty-five years with an eclectic array of fine art by European and American masters, furniture, pottery, textiles, bric-a-brac, toys, and other objects, augmented by the content and associations that these objects hold for him—the images and artworks he arranges on his walls, the books he puts on his shelves, the music he plays, the cinema he watches—all organized in an architecturally-distinguished setting.

The exhibit features works by artists Ashbery has counted among his intimate friends and those he has paid homage to as critic, many of whom have subtly influenced his poetry. Scholars and critics increasingly acknowledge the inspirational role that environments play in Ashbery’s creative process, looking to the Hudson house, which some consider to be his most ambitious and fully-realized artwork, for insight into how he uniquely populates his spaces, poetry and collages with things intended to trigger and reflect his imagination. Viewers are invited to discover the breadth of Ashbery’s personal collections, spanning some eight decades, in this unusual exhibition.

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror won the three major American prizes – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Considered by many to be the most important living poet writing in English, Ashbery has published more than twenty collections, most recently Quick Question (2012, Ecco) and his highly acclaimed translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations (2011, Norton). He served as executive editor of Art News and as an art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek, and exhibits his collages at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. President Obama presented Ashbery with a National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2012. His collages and items from his personal collections are shown here by arrangement with Tibor de Nagy Gallery."--Gallery website.

Text includes works by: John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Joseph Cornell, Henry Darger, Giorgio de Chirico, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Shirley Goldfarb, Jean Hélion, Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Fairfield Porter, Archie Rand, Larry Rivers, Mark Tobey, Trevor Winkfield (all present in the exhibition).
Table of contents: title: Right at home: on John Ashbery's Hudson house and its collections --; title: from A magically alive aesthetic: [on John Ashbery's] Reported sightings (1989) -- Jed Perl.