Texts by Luke Syson and Steven Holmes. Conversation between Mickey Cartin and David Leiber

An exciting, unexpected, and beautiful encounter with one collector’s deeply personal assemblage of works

Since the 1980s, Mickey Cartin has assembled a remarkable collection of objects and art—Renaissance and modernist paintings, master prints, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and contemporary art, with a focus on certain artists in depth. Exploring the theory behind collecting art and how Cartin’s approach diverges from common practices, this publication offers a unique perspective on an intimate endeavor. Unconcerned with hewing to specific categories, time periods, or media, Cartin’s collection—which includes the likes of Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, and Forrest Bess—creates active combinations and disrupts homogeneity, privileging the drive of curiosity. 

A documentation of the celebrated exhibition Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021, this publication includes additional artworks from Cartin’s trove along with views of his home, conveying how he lives and engages day-to-day with these works. Cartin selected each work in the exhibition and publication as a reflection of his deep connections with the many artists represented therein. The conversation between Cartin and David Leiber illuminates the tensions between study and instinct, reading versus experiencing, as well as the influences and figures that inform his personal, curatorial practice. With texts by the curator of the Cartin Collection, Steven Holmes, and the art historian Luke Syson, this inspiring volume is a spirited investigation of a very different method of and approach to collecting.

About the Cartin Collection
The Cartin Collection includes nearly 2,000 works in various media including early Netherlandish painting, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, nineteenth-century paintings and drawings, and an extensive collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. In 2005, the Cartin Collection began to produce exhibitions in partnership with museums, alternative spaces, and galleries in New York, Boston, Miami, and Hartford, as well as in Paris and Berlin. The collection continues to loan extensively across all fields, periods, and media.