Wang Guohua collects cigarette boxes. Lisa Courtney has amassed thelargest cache of Pokemon memorabilia. Then there’s John Reznikoff, who holds the Guinness World Record for holding the largest portfolio of celebrity hair samples. Whether they’re movie ticket stubs, found objects, or comic books, the vast majority of us, invariably, collect something. Now, thanks to the New Museum, we’ve been given a window into more private worlds of collecting.
To promote their current exhibition, “The Keeper,” which takes aim at exploring the multifarious things we keep (and the ways we hold onto them), the New Museum launched a campaign with the hashtag #TheKeeper, which invites participants to share images and stories about the things they collect and why.
Between scrapbook artist Shinro Ohtake and an endless offering of vintage photographs by Ydessa Hendeles, the show grapples with the things we hold onto. As artnet News’s Brian Boucher describes the exhibition in his review, “it explores the impulse to preserve, archive, and protect objects, and suggests blurred lines between benign and destructive forms of classification.”