The Morgan Library & Museum

Not every work in “Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery's Collection” depicts Ashbery's likeness.

Jane Freilicher’s "Untitled (ARTnews)" (1963), which she later gifted to Ashbery, may instead represent the poet through the visual language of Cubist still lifes, where newspaper titles often appear as coded references to people and events beyond the frame.

Ashbery had been writing criticism for ARTnews since the 1950s, becoming one of its editors in 1965. Freilicher’s arrangement of flowers and fruit, paired with a red notebook and an issue of the magazine, suggests either a reference to the poet himself or perhaps simply a scene one could easily imagine him inhabiting.

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Jane Freilicher
New York 1924–2014 New York
Untitled (ARTnews), 1963
Pastel and charcoal
Gift of David K. Kermani, from the collection of John Ashbery; 2019.158
[Morgan library & museum, Ashbery, New york school poetry, Visual art, Contemporary art]

Salman Toor’s “Camera Group” (2022), a work that appeared in our past exhibition “Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling,” conveys the anticipation of a group of immigrants being photographed as they enter a new country. In this series, Toor explores ideas of cultural origin, mixing the familiar and the fantastical, as well as themes of belonging and identity, subjects that reflect his own life as a Pakistani-born gay man and immigrant to the United States.

When Toor graduated from Pratt Institute in 2009, he was creating figurative paintings in the academic tradition. A few years later, he adopted a looser style, with cartoon elements influenced by his interest in graphic novels. Much of Toor’s work explores the intersection of race, q***r identity, and the immigrant experience, depicting young South Asian men in intimate, often fantastical settings that move between marginalization, cultural difference, and joy.

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Salman Toor
1983–
Camera Group
2022
18 x 12 inches (45.7 x 30.5 cm)
Ink and gouache on paper.
2023.72
[Morgan library and museum, AAPI heritage month, Visual art, Contemporary art]