Honoring the Past, Welcoming the Future

As the Art Museum staff gears up for 2021, we are bolstered by the knowledge that although last year presented many challenges, the permanent collection continued to develop during 2020. Thanks to the generosity of donors and benefactors, new acquisitions to the collection include the following highlights:

• Fifteenth century Spanish lusterware shallow bowl

• Nineteenth century 4-panel Japanese painted screen signed Gyoho, depicting “Genji in Snow with His Retainers”

• Circa 1907-1908 watercolor painting by Columbus-born artist Alice Schille (1869-1955), titled Harvest, Brittany

• Lithograph by the renown American abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), titled Red Samurai (from Three Poems by Octavio Paz), 1987-88

• Eight photographs by Donna Ferrato (American, b. 1949) from her watershed “Living with the Enemy” series of domestic abuse images.

Other stand-out works which will be available for exhibition and scholarly use include a set of 24 Japanese late Edo-period woodblock actor prints, an acrylic and

sand painting by the contemporary Navajo artist Peter Ray James (b. 1965), and a poignant monoprint by retiring Department of Art Professor Ellen Price.

To honor Price’s thirty years of teaching at Miami’s Oxford campus, the College of Creative Arts and Art Department purchased Folio, 2008, specifically for donation to MUAM. Using a paper lithography process, Price created the work from an early-20th century photograph of an African American great-uncle, William Price, the younger brother of Ellen Price’s paternal grandfather. With this print and others in the series, Price sought to “locate my identity between the revealed and the hidden” and to “acknowledge the imperceptible pull which the past exerts on the present.”

At the time this issue of Visual Arts at Miami is published, the difficult year of 2020 will finally be in the past. Yet the opportunity to ponder the beautiful and often complex histories of objects in MUAM’s permanent collection may help us to reevaluate some of our most demanding experiences as global citizens. We encourage you to engage with the artwork in the exhibitions and collections–either in person or virtually–both now and in the future. And, if there is something currently not on display that you are curious about, please feel free to contact me, Laura Stewart, at stewarle@miamioh.edu for more information.

Robert Motherwell (American, 1915-1991) Red Samurai (from Three Poems by Octavio Paz ), 1987-88 Lithograph, Edition of 50, 1/5 HC; 13 3/4” x 10 3/4” Gift of Carol Kane, 2020.2

By Laura Stewart, Collections Manager/Registrar