NEW YORK, NY.- Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery’s Collection, on view from May 1 through October 25, 2026, features selections from a 2019 gift to the Morgan Library & Museum of twenty-eight works on paper from the collection of the American poet John Ashbery (1927–2017), donated by his husband, David K. Kermani. Centered on this remarkable and deeply personal group of works, the exhibition offers an intimate portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most significant American poets through his engagement with the visual arts, illuminating the rich interplay between his poetry, friendships, and art criticism.

Ashbery was an art critic for three decades and often found inspiration for his poetry in the visual arts. He developed numerous friendships with artists, including Joe Brainard, Jane Freilicher, Jean Hélion, Fairfield Porter, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Larry Rivers. Many of the works in Ashbery’s collection were gifts from the artists themselves, which he and Kermani displayed in their home in Hudson, New York. Ashbery often directly collaborated with artists with whom he felt he shared an artistic kinship, seen in the exhibition through volumes of his poetry published with artists like Joan Mitchell, Joe Brainard, and Alex Katz.

“The Morgan is honored to share and steward this important part of John Ashbery’s legacy, thanks to the extraordinary gift of his collection from David Kermani,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “An exhibition that stands at the intersection of the visual arts and literature, Friends Who Came to See Me illuminates the shared influence between the visual arts and one of the greatest American poets of the last century.”

“This exhibition is a rare opportunity to explore the creative process through a poet’s art collection,” said Claire Gilman, curator of the exhibition and Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum. “Much like the collages favored by Ashbery himself, what emerges from this collection of portraits and other works is a kaleidoscopic experience of his life and work, which together offer a fuller view of how Ashbery experienced the world around him.”

Highlights from the exhibition include eight portraits of Ashbery by Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Philip Pearlstein, among others. It also features Late for School (1948), one of the very first collages that Ashbery created while he was a student at Harvard in the late 1940s, signaling his early interest in Surrealism. Textual material from the Morgan’s collection includes a 1984 edition of Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)—the only book to have ever won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award—which features commissioned images by artists like Richard Avedon and Elaine de Kooning.