WITH A FOCUS on work at the intersection between language and visual expression, Marvin and Ruth Sackner collected more than 75,000 objects that range from artist’s books and typewriter art to picture poems and mail art. Marvin, who was also a leading pulmonologist and medical-device inventor, died on September 29, 2020, preceded by his wife, Ruth, who died on October 11, 2015, and the legacy of their decades-long passion for word-based art includes the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, which relocated from their Miami Beach home to the University of Iowa in 2019.
Whether Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1917 poems that appear as horses and flowers, the experimental Fluxus writing of the 1970s, the 1980s LED scrolls of text by Jenny Holzer, or Tom Phillips’s A Humument alteration of a Victorian novel completed in 2016, the Sackners’ interests spanned the breadth of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic movements. They did not follow collecting trends and often were acquiring work others overlooked. Their partnership has indelibly enhanced appreciation for the creative spark that comes from the joining of art and words.