John Ashbery collection of artwork and objects

The collection consists of artwork and objects collected by American poet John Ashbery. It includes paintings, glassware, ceramics, clothing, household objects, realia, printed material, collage materials, and other items of significance to Ashbery, some of which inspired his poetry or appeared in his published work. The collection includes materials by or received from Ashbery's husband David Kermani and artists Joe Brainard and Trevor Winkfield, among others. All materials were kept in Ashbery's house in Hudson, New York, or his New York City apartment.

In close consultation with John Ashbery’s husband David Kermani, curator Nancy Kuhl and Ashbery biographer Karin Roffman chose the objects in this collection from among many similar objects in John Ashbery’s homes in New York City and Hudson, New York, shortly after his death. As representative samples from the poet’s large and rich personal collections, the objects here suggest something of the wide range of Ashbery’s interests and gesture towards the depth, complexity, and enormity of his collections in their entirety. As a subset of a much larger whole, this group highlights Ashbery’s sensibility, an artist who collected both within and across categories (plates printed with rebus puzzles, for example, are at home in a larger collection of plates and a collection of rebus puzzles in various formats). Other objects from Ashbery’s collections are held by libraries, museums, and institutions, including the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, Deerfield Academy, the Pultneyville Historical Society, and the Flow Chart Foundation. The Beinecke Library’s collection of Ashbery objects is organized both by place (New York City or Hudson) and by room, reflecting the location of objects at the time of Ashbery’s death and for the preceding few years when decreased mobility inhibited the poet’s practice of frequently moving individual objects from one room to another and from one home to another.