The Morgan Library & Museum

Here’s a glimpse from the Morgan’s archives! This letter from poet Amy Lowell is addressed to the Morgan’s first director, Belle Greene. In it, Lowell requests to do research on the Morgan’s collection of John Keats manuscripts. She was the first scholar to seriously study this material. At the time, Lowell was working on a major new biography of Keats, based primarily around the Morgan’s collections and her own Keats material.

In the letter, Lowell requests to bring her “friend” Ada Dwyer Russell, her partner and a well-known actress, to a private event at the Morgan with the Authors Club of New York. Lowell’s biography of Keats would ultimately be the first and only publication that she dared to dedicate to her life partner, appearing with this dedication: ““To A.D.R. This, and all my books A.L.”

Read more about Greene, Lowell, and the Morgan’s Keats collection in the online exhibition at this link: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/belle-greenes-keats.

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Amy Lowell, typed letter to Belle da Costa Greene, 5 February 1921. MA 4098. Archives of the Morgan Library & Museum.

[pride, pride month, amy lowell, belle greene, john keats, poetry, manuscripts, biography, morgan library, morgan library and museum]

What is this little birdie telling you? For artist Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985), the baby bird symbolizes the cyclical nature of bodies and the need to survive.

This collage is part of Kang’s series “Mesoderm,” a reference to the middle germ layer in early embryonic cell development. Like a seed, the mesoderm contains all the resources an organism needs to mature. Kang’s process, which puts little pieces of necessary resources together, including darkroom chemicals, oil pastel, ink, and bits of tissue paper, references gestation.

Born in Toronto, Kang’s interdisciplinary work focuses on the relationship between bodies and their environments, as well as the nature of impermanence, both physically and historically. Her work, which spans photography, sculpture, and site-responsive installation, often meld organic, structural, and metabolic themes, as they do in this photogram.
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Lotus L. Kang (Canadian, b. 1985)
Mesoderm (You III), 2025
Photogram, photographic paper, darkroom chemicals, oil pastel, ink, and tissue paper in artist’s frame
16 5/8 x 13 5/8 x 1 1/2 inches (42.2 x 34.6 x 3.8 cm)
Purchased on the Manley Family Fund.
2025.98 [TMP 2025-137.1]

[Morgan library and museum, AAPI heritage month, Visual art, Contemporary art]

Peter Hujar’s famous photograph, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed,” printed from the top-right frame marked with a dot, appeared in the New York Daily News shortly after her death in March 1974, and in several other publications soon thereafter. Perhaps due to this wide public circulation, Hujar excluded the image from his 1976 book “Portraits in Life and Death.”

Before checking into Cabrini Health Care Center for testing in September 1973, Warhol superstar Candy Darling asked Hujar to make a portrait “for my fans.” The contact sheet reveals the most iconic still of Candy lying languidly in bed, surrounded by movement, laughter, and theatricality.

Hujar later described their session as a kind of performance, recalling that Candy was “playing every death scene from every movie.” He mirrored this cinematic sensibility in his composition and printing process, shaping the final image so that the dreary details of the room—fluorescent light, hospital bedding, a single rose—are transformed into an icon reminiscent of Hollywood’s golden-age portraiture.

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Candy Darling, Cabrini Health Care Center, 1973
Job 587, 6 sheets
Contact sheet
11 x 8 ½ inches
2013.108:8.5770
Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Ortuzar, New York; © The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS).




[Morgan library & museum, Photography, Visual art, Historic photography, Film photography, NYC art scene]

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]

It’s your final week to see “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg” before it closes this Sunday, May 31!

Organized in collaboration with the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg (Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg), the exhibition traces the extraordinary life and legacy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Across two galleries, the presentation brings together the Morgan’s holdings of Mozart manuscripts and first editions with significant objects from Salzburg shown in the United States for the first time, including Mozart’s clavichord, on which he composed The Magic Flute, and his childhood violin, alongside portraits, letters, and personal objects.

Don’t miss your last chance to experience these remarkable objects from Salzburg before they return home!

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Attributed to Giambettino Cignaroli (1706–1770). Mozart in Verona [1770]. Oil on canvas. On loan to the Mozarteum from a private collection. International Mozarteum Foundation, Salzburg





[Morgan library and museum, Morgan library tickets, Mozart, Don giovanni opera, Magic flute opera, Music by mozart, Mozart sheet music, Classical music history]

Memorial Day is a day for remembrance of those who have died in service to our country. It was first widely observed on May 30, 1868 to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers. “The Star-Spangled Banner” gained special significance during the Civil War, a time when many Americans turned to music to express their feelings for the flag and the ideals and values it represented.

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The Star Spangled Banner; a pariotic [sic] song. Air: Anacreon in Heaven. Adapd. & arrd. by T. C.
First edition.
Music ascribed to John Stafford Smith; Words by Francis Scott Key.
The Morgan Library & Museum. Fuld Collection. Photography by Graham S. Haber.








[Morgan library and museum, new york city museum, memorial day, history, museum]

The Morgan Book Project is a yearlong school partnership program for 3rd–12th grade students and teachers from New York City public schools.

Across multiple sessions, participants explore medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and traditional bookmaking techniques during visits to the Morgan. Inspired by what they see, classes then write, illustrate, and create their own books. The program culminates in an awards ceremony and an exhibition featuring selected student works.

The deadline to apply for next year’s Morgan Book Project is Friday, May 29! Know a New York City public school teacher? Tag them in the comments! Check out the link for the application and more info: https://www.themorgan.org/education/morgan-book-project

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Photography by Snigdha Das

“Hujar: Contact” is now open at the Morgan through October 25!

This major exhibition offers an intimate look at the life and artistic evolution of photographer Peter Hujar. Featuring more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements drawn from the Morgan’s Peter Hujar Collection, which holds over 5,700 contact sheets, the exhibition reveals the artist’s working process across decades.

Hujar began organizing and numbering his contact sheets at age twenty-one, allowing his career to be traced from his early years as a studio assistant in the 1950s and 1960s, through his work in fashion, music, and advertising, and into his mature period as a leading figure in the East Village art world.

These contact sheets open up the world surrounding a Hujar photograph. Marked with edits that trace his creative thinking, they reveal the life of an image from exposure to enlargement.

“Hujar: Contact” is organized by Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography, and is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Morgan Library & Museum in association with MACK, which explores Hujar’s original contact sheets and job books, with critical texts by Smith and transcriptions and annotations of the job books by Olivia McCall.

The exhibition is made possible by the Photography Collectors Committee, the Charles E. Pierce Jr. Fund for Exhibitions, the Margaret T. Morris Fund for Americana, the Sherman Fairchild Fund for Exhibitions, and Richard L. and Ronay Menschel, with additional support from the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation Inc., the Scholz Family Fund, and the Young Fellows of the Morgan Library & Museum. With this exhibition the Morgan honors Life Trustee Richard L. Menschel (1934–2026) for the acquisition of Peter Hujar's contact sheets through the Charina Endowment Fund.

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Peter Hujar, (1934– 1987)
Self-portraits at 189 Second Avenue, 1974, job 620
The Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, New York purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013, 2013.108:8.2110. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Ortuzar, New York; © The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS).




[Morgan library & museum, Photography, Visual art, Historic photography, Film photography, NYC art scene]

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]