There is something about a private collection that forces the collector to think about who he or she is—both as a collector and, indeed, as a person. The result can yield something like comprehensiveness: a constellation of themes—for example, music, literature, fashion, politics, cosmology, and photography itself— that approximate the personality of the individual who brought them together. shego/hego/ego, a minimalist poem by Emmett Williams, repurposed as an artwork by Natalie Czech, is a handy solution to the quest for consistency between such realms. But who among us, if we were collectors, would not reveal an inner complexion at once methodological yet prone to exceptions? We all suffer from the dual impulses to categorize primly and then to venture out of bounds, to break our own rules. The McEvoy Family Collection has been guided by certain acknowledged interests (Nion McEvoy has been a poet, a publisher, a drummer, a meditation teacher, and a lawyer) yet has also been susceptible to poetic leaps and sheer mischief. So if you take a certain set of rational themes and rename them according to certain artworks that embody those themes, you get something closer to what the lifeblood of any collection is all about. Instead of music, literature, etc., you get “music today”, “Moyra reading”, “how we see”, “I am a man”, “fourth dimension” and, ultimately, “pictures pictures” because this is (mostly) a photography collection, after all.

Kevin Moore Independent Curator, New York