The Baltimore Museum of Art has acquired 162 works representing a wide range of perspectives and innovations.
According to the museum, the acquisitions came by gift and purchase between July and December of 2022 and reflect efforts by curators to diversify the range of voices, narratives and art forms in the BMA’s permanent collection.
They also help close gaps in the museum’s holdings, in both terms of its historic and contemporary works, and continue the museums’ efforts to support artists with ties to Baltimore. In at least nine cases, an artist’s work is being added to the museum’s collection for the first time.
Among some of the highlights are historic and contemporary paintings and works on paper by Sarah Biffin, Lucy Bull, Nancy Ellen Craig, Cianne Fragione, Beatrice Glow, Rachel Jones, Bertina Lopes, Nengi Omuku, Anil Revri, Deborah Roberts, Esphyr Slobodkina, Lilly Steiner, Joan Witek, and Bai Yiluo.
Also added to the collection is video work by Alan Michelson; sculpture and objects by Brent Crothers, Theaster Gates, Duane Linklater, and Eva Zeisel; photographs by Daido Moriyama, Dodo Jing Ming, Kimbei Kusakabe, Shikeith, Wei Rong, and Wang Wusheng; and works by Baltimore artists Nefertiti Goodman, Erin Fostel, and Jackie Milad.
The museum received several gifts of collections and groups of works, including 27 examples of Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential pattern china from Jonathan Kolker and Frederica Kolker Saxon, given in memory of their parents. The pattern was designed by Theodore Russell Davis (1840-1894) between 1879-80 and produced by Haviland and Co. in Limoges, France, first for the White House and then for public acquisition from 1880 to 1886.
The Enamel Arts Foundation, an organization founded by Harold Nelson and Bernard Jazzar in 2007 to increase scholarship and public awareness of 20th- and 21st-century American enamel arts, gave the museum 17 objects by artists and designers such as Harold B. Helwig, Juan Esteban Perez, June Schwarcz, and Jade Snow Wong.
Additionally, a significant promised gift from long-time BMA supporters Norman and Lorraine Rocklin consists of three major Modernist works: Woman with a Cat (1964) by Pablo Picasso, Bronzino Young Man (1985) by Grace Hartigan, and Blue Violin (1986) by Susan Rothenberg.
“We are looking forward to sharing the newest acquisitions with our audiences and to presenting more complex and nuanced narratives about the evolution of art and its relationship to everyday experiences in our galleries,” said Asma Naeem, the museum’s Interim Co-Director and Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator, in a statement.
“I am grateful for the deep and thoughtful work of our curatorial team in advocating for voices and objects that have long deserved institutional and scholarly recognition as well as for identifying new and emerging talents, in Baltimore and across the country and the globe,” she added.
