The Baltimore Museum of Art announced Thursday that it has acquired more than 100 works of art, including the first work of performance art in the museum’s collection as well as several pieces by Native artists.
Interdisciplinary artist Jefferson Pinder’s performance art piece “Ben-Hur” involves six Black men engaging in “actions that recall representations of labor in art,” according to a news release announcing the acquisitions.
The “Ben-Hur” piece is accompanied by a detailed guide and video documentation of the performance, allowing the BMA to stage it in the future.
The museum also acquired the first edition of Pinder’s related standalone video piece, also titled “Ben-Hur.”
Among the BMA’s acquisitions of artworks by Native artists is a specially commissioned work by Maryland-based artist Mark Tayac, the 29th generation hereditary Chief of the Piscataway Indian Nation and a member of the Beaver clan. The commissioned artwork is a traditional beaver pouch bag that Tayac made by hand with beaver hide and deerskin, and adorned with white clamshells, wampum shell beads, and deer toes.
“It was created using methods passed down through generations and emulates historical bags made to hold tobacco and an effigy pipe. The work connects to the tobacco history of the Maryland region, which is also the ancestral homeland of the Piscataway Indian Nation,” reads the news release.
The BMA also acquired a single-channel, high-definition video “niwaniskān isi kiya | I Awake To You” by Meryl McMaster (nêhiyaw from Red Pheasant Cree Nation). McMaster uses film to showcase a dreaming journey through the Red Pheasant Cree Nation’s reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Jeremy Frey, an artist and ecological activist from the Passamaquoddy tribe, created an “optically radiant basket” titled Aura. Light shines off of the red and turquoise colors and geometry of the basket’s traditional Wabanaki porcupine pattern. Frey comes from a “long line of revered Native basket makers,” according to the news release.
These acquisitions precede the BMA’s upcoming initiative “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum.” Launching April 21, the series of exhibitions and projects will focus on Native artists’ work, experiences, and voices.
The BMA was gifted several artworks from Darnell Burfoot, the president of the museum’s Prints, Drawings & Photographs Society. They include four lithographs by John Biggers, a limited-edition screen print by Obey (aka Shepard Fairey), an example of Frank Gehry’s “Wiggle Side Chair,” and a silk skirt produced by Kara Walker and Ann Demeulemeester, among other works.
Los Angeles-based collectors Gail and Tony Ganz gifted 13 photograph reprints from Gordon Parks’ “The Atmosphere of Crime” series to the BMA. As part of the series, Parks photographed crime, policing, and criminality in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles during six weeks in 1957.
The acquisitions also include paintings by Marie Bracquemond, Brenda Goodman, Alexander Harrison, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Hung Liu, Kylie Manning, Megan Rooney, James Alexander Simpson, Helen Torr, Susan Catherine Waters, and James Williams II; sculptural works by Rhea Dillon, Doyle Lane, Jiha Moon, Shahzia Sikander, and Chiffon Thomas; video by Justen Leroy and Sin Wai Kin; and works on paper by Merikokeb Berhanu, Darrel Ellis, Dindga McCannon, Peter Milton, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, among other artworks.
“The acquisitions announced today reflect the BMA’s vision to continue to stridently expand our collection through both the artists represented and the global narratives that can be shared with these objects,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “The works entering our collection activate broader understandings of our moment, our communities, and our histories while creating space for new and underappreciated voices and experiences.”
Naeem continued, “Our mission at the BMA is to tell stories that are both rooted in our local context and offer a lens into global cultures and expressions that reveal our shared humanity. This selection of works beautifully represents this effort and I am grateful to our curatorial team for their insight as we continue forward.”
