Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection

Mickey Cartin’s collection includes nearly two thousand 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. Cartin is a former trustee of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Public Art Fund, Printed Matter in New York, and The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, where he served as its vice president and was active on its curatorial committee. Since 2006, he has lived full time in New York, where he serves on the Board of Directors of The Master Drawings Association and on several visiting committees at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Steven Holmes has been the curator of the Cartin Collection since 2005. From 2009 to 2012 he was Adjunct Curator at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and from 2000 to 2005 he was the Director of Visual Arts and Public Programming at Real Art Ways in Hartford. In 2008, Holmes edited the catalogue Festschrift, with essays by Carlos Basualdo, Nicholas Baume, and James Rondeau, and his essays have appeared in Explode Every Day and Oh, Canada. Holmes has curated exhibitions in New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Miami, Boston and Hartford, and has been a visiting critic at Skowhegan, Ontario College of Art and Design, Yale School of Art, Art Omi, University of Connecticut, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, and Hartford Art School. His projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The New Yorker, Le Monde, Die Zeit, artnet, artUS, ARTnews, Tema Celeste, Flash Art International, and Art New England.

David Leiber, a partner at David Zwirner in New York, works closely with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Estate of Diane Arbus, and major collectors of work by Giorgio Morandi, as well as the contemporary artist Liu Ye. In addition to curating Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings in 2015 and Albers and Morandi: Never Finished in 2021, he has overseen numerous exhibitions at the gallery, including Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art (2018), Juan Muñoz: Seven Rooms (2022), Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited (2022), and Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985 (2022). In 2023, David curated the gallery’s Roma/New York, 1953–1964 exhibition, exploring the significant intellectual and artistic cross-pollination between artists in the centers of Italian and American art in the 1950s and 1960s.

Luke Syson is the fourteenth director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. From 2012 to 2019, he was the chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he led the complete refurbishment of the British Galleries, which opened in March 2020. He has held curatorial positions at the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Gallery, London, where he led the successful campaign to acquire Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks for the nation and curated the highly acclaimed exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan in 2011. Since arriving in Cambridge, he has overseen a series of acclaimed exhibitions, ranging from Hockney’s Eye to Gold of the Great Steppe.