Ashbery Collaboration, The

by John Ashbery

This catalogue documents a body of work created by Hammond following a unique collaboration with the renowned poet John Ashbery. In 1993, Hammond commissioned Ashbery to create a set of unique titles that would act as catalysts for her recombinative paintings. Ashbery provided 44 such titles that employ his characteristically eclectic use of language, such as Confessions of a Fop, A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets, Freezer Burn, and others. Since 1993, these titles have been the initial source of Hammond's creative process. The 60 paintings created to date in this series are, like all of her work, produced from a controlled iconographic pool of 276 pictorial representations, drawn from such texts as 19th-century technical manuals, old children's books, pornographic comics, and the like. The relationships between titles and paintings range from obscure to playfully evident, yet all derive from the lively intersection between language and image.

80 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2002

About the author

Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.