Ruth Sackner R.I.P.
I was very sad to hear that Ruth Sackner passed away last week. When in Miami last year, I was delighted to receive an invitation to visit Ruth and Marvin Sackner to see their extraordinary Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry. It was a phenomenal experience. I remember Ruth was wearing alphabet earrings and an alphabet jacket, and she was especially delighted to show off her walk-in wardrobe containing an enormous collection of fabulous letter-clothes. An article from The Miami Herald is pasted below*. Ruth Sackner R.I.P.
*Ruth Sackner didn’t only collect art. She lived it.
Every inch of the Miami condo she shared with her husband, Marvin, was covered with pieces from their art collection, which was all about words.
“I love living in a museum,” she said a few years ago in a short video about the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. “In fact when we drive up in our driveway we always say, ‘Home, sweet museum.’”
The collection wasn’t confined to their condo. In 2013, hundreds of pieces from the Sackner collection were put on display at the just-opened Pérez Art Museum Miami in an exhibition called A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.
Ruth Sackner, along with her husband, amassed more than 75,000 pieces of word art, making it the largest collection in the world. She died in her sleep Saturday at 79.
PoetryFilm 
