One of the things I love most about going to museums is that I rarely leave with only what I came for.
I went to the Morgan Library to see the tarot exhibition, which I wrote about previously. While I was there, I wandered into Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery’s Collection, on view through October 25, 2026. Poetry has always been one of my great loves, and I was reminded how much friendships shape creative lives. Ashbery’s world was filled with artists, writers, and conversations that crossed disciplines, each enriching the others.
In the exhibition I encountered the work of James Bishop, an artist I had never really known. I came home and immediately began reading about him, finding an insightful essay by a Johns Hopkins professor and then discovering documentation of his 2014 exhibition at David Zwirner. One discovery led naturally to another.
Later that day, my son asked me what it means to be a colorist. We ended up talking about James Bishop and David Hockney, and how color can be the subject of a painting as much as the image itself. That conversation continued with my husband and later with friends. An afternoon at the museum became a week of conversations.
This is one of the reasons I continue to make time for looking at art. You arrive with an intention, and if you stay open, you leave with something you never expected. An exhibition becomes a poem. A painting becomes a question. A question becomes a conversation. Curiosity has a way of expanding outward, connecting ideas, people, and experiences that otherwise might never have met.
That, to me, is one of art’s greatest gifts. It doesn’t simply give us something to look at. It gives us something to keep thinking about, talking about, and sharing long after we’ve left the museum.
