The Baltimore Museum of Art announced today that it has received a $550,000 gift from supporters Amy Gould and Matthew Polk to expand its African art collection and support related research and publications.
The gift comes as the museum is planning to reinstall its African, Indigenous American and Oceanic art galleries and is implementing a multi-year strategic plan to tell more diverse stories and address “artistic omissions” in its collections.
The museum’s collection includes approximately 2,500 works from Africa and is particularly strong in figurative sculpture from western and central areas of the continent as well as beadwork from its eastern and southern regions. In honor of the donors, the gift will be referred to as the Amy Gould/Matthew Polk Fund.
“Over the past two years, the BMA has been developing a collections roadmap that addresses omissions and disparities across the entirety of its collection, including a particular focus on arts of Africa and the African diaspora,” said Christopher Bedford, the museum’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, in a statement.
This gift “expands our vision for collection diversification beyond work from the Post-War and contemporary eras, where field-wide discussions on diversity are largely focused, and also informs the approach for the reinstallation of our galleries. We are so grateful to Amy and Matthew for their many years of generous and active support. This incredible gift allows us to begin actualizing our goals for further enhancing our African art collection.”
Located on the museum’s first level, the galleries of African, Oceanic and Indigenous American art have been closed due to the construction of the adjacent Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies and Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. They’re scheduled to reopen on December 12, 2022.
Besides reinterpreting the arts of Africa within existing gallery spaces, the reinstallation includes creating separate dedicated galleries for Oceanic art and Indigenous American art. This will be the first time in the museum’s history that Oceanic art and Indigenous American art will be separated from the arts of Africa at the museum.
Directors say the reinstallation will result in the largest and most ambitious presentation to date of the museum’s collection of historic, non-Western art. It also will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the museum’s first acquisition of a non-Western work of art.
The reinstalled galleries will provide visitors with a chronological history of art, emphasizing innovation and change over time while contextualizing artistic transformations within social, political, religious, and cultural histories.
Gould, the founder of Gould Architects P. A., is a museum trustee. She serves as chair of its Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands (AAAPI) Art Accessions Committee. She is also a member of the museum’s Cultural Property Working Group, which developed a new Collections Management Policy that the museum’s Board of Trustees voted to adopt on June 22.
Gould co-founded the Historic Textile Research Foundation, an organization that supports research, publication, and exhibition of historically-important textiles. Holding degrees in both Fine Arts and Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, she has also served as a Trustee of The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Polk is a former BMA Trustee, a former chair of the AAAPI Art Accessions Committee, and a current member of the museum’s Cultural Property Working Group. He was co-founder and chairman of Baltimore-based Polk Audio, Inc., a manufacturer of high-fidelity loudspeakers for home, car and computer applications. He is currently a partner in MSI DFAT Services, LLC, a Baltimore-based provider of spacecraft testing services.
Polk was a founding member of the Peabody Advisory Council and the Johns Hopkins Physics and Astronomy Advisory Council. He is a current board member of The Walters Art Museum and serves on its Collections committee. With Gould, he co-founded the Historic Textile Research Foundation.
Over the past 40 years, Gould and Polk have assembled a collection of textiles that are regularly loaned to museums for exhibitions and made available to scholars for research.
“We are pleased and honored that our long-term commitment is now making a meaningful contribution to the BMA’s focus on the arts of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands,” Gould and Polk said in a statement.
“We can learn a great deal from these societies whose art and culture have influenced our modern lives in more ways than most of us imagine. We compliment the BMA for their efforts to continue telling their stories.”
