The Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art

THE MARK H. REECE COLLECTION OF STUDENT-ACQUIRED

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THE MARK H. REECE COLLECTION OF STUDENT-ACQUIRED

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Table of Contents

Foreword

In 1963, Mark Reece (’49, P ’77, P ’81, P ’85), Wake Forest’s dean of men and College Union advisor, had a vision to establish a contemporary art collection for the College. In the true spirit of Wake Forest and its consistent mission to make our students and their learning goals our first priority, all acquisitions for this new collection would be led by students. At the time, Wake Forest lacked not only an art collection but also an art department. Even so, Dean Reece’s bold objectives were unanimously accepted by the governing board: to purchase and collect student-selected art created during each generation and to bring localized awareness to the College’s shortcomings in the area of art and — thereby, they hoped — see a department of art established.

With no money allocated that first year for the purchase of artwork, Reece cobbled together funds from other student organizations that went unspent the previous year. That June, Dean Reece, along with Dean Ed Wilson (’43, P ’91, P ’93), Professor J. Allen Easley and two students, drove to New York City — the center of the contemporary art world — with the purpose of exploring the city’s art galleries. They returned from that first trip with a dozen works of art, all selected by the students.

Every four years since, an acquisition committee composed of a small group of students has traveled to New York City with university funds to purchase art by nationally and internationally recognized artists for what is now named the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art. As courageous and progressive as it was in 1963, the

students’ charge has remained consistent over six decades: to purchase artworks that reflect the times. This brilliant policy has built a collection that today is both a reflection of major trends in modern art history and an ode to the social and political concerns shaping each four-year period.

What started as an experimental concept, the “student artbuying trip” (as it is fondly known), now serves as a model for peer universities and still remains the most rigorous and robust learning and acquisition experience of its kind. This revered tradition has empowered three generations of students to amass a nationally renowned collection of contemporary art.

This catalog celebrates the 60th anniversary of the student art-buying program and the collection that honors Dean Reece and his visionary leadership. This publication would not be realized without the support from John (’81) and Libby Reece (P ’09, P ’14). Their steadfast commitment to the care and stewardship of the Reece Collection that honors their father and father-in-law paved the way for this commemorative catalog. Our gratitude goes to the following alumni, faculty and staff members for their insightful contributions to the catalog: Professors Jay Curley and Leigh Ann Hallberg; J. D. Wilson (’69, P ’01), 1969 student artbuying trip participant and tireless supporter and advocate of the Reece Collection; and former student art-buying committee members Caroline Culp (’13) and Jay Buchanan (’17), whose catalog entries expand the discourse about the Collection. We thank Madeleine Douglas (’23) for her initial

design work and editing and Jessica Burlingame, collections manager, who was a key contributor to the success of this project due to her attention to detail in amassing images, image rights and other essential information.

Our gratitude to Hayes Henderson, Shana Atkins, Kris Hendershott and Jill Carson of Wake Forest University’s Communications and External Relations team, who gave structure and beauty to the design of this book and shepherded us through this effort.

Our heartfelt appreciation goes to Cristin Tierney (’93) and J. D. Wilson, co-chairs of the 60th Anniversary Reece Collection Steering Committee, and all Steering Committee members and donors (alumni, parents and friends) who have supported the Reece Collection and student-led art acquisition program with their deep commitment to our students. A special note of gratitude to Cathy and Jeff Dishner (P ’21), whose generous gift will increase the frequency of the art-buying trip to every three years starting in 2024, allowing more students to participate in this transformative experience.

We thank the leadership of the Provost’s Office for years of support for the program, and the vice provost of the Arts & Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Professor Christina Soriano, who continuously uplifts the Reece Collection and the studentled art acquisition program as a cornerstone of Wake the Arts. We acknowledge all current and former professors in the art department, with a special note of remembrance for

Professor Robert H. Knott, whose guidance and leadership helped to maintain the integrity and rigor of this program. We recognize all the faculty and staff who taught the required Global Contemporary Art & Criticism courses, served as advisors, accompanied students on buying trips to New York, acted as art stewards and taught from the collection. We also recognize Paul Bright, director of Hanes Gallery, and his team for their collaboration and exhibition support for Reece Collection acquisitions over the years.

Good art poses questions and introduces us to ideas and concepts. The art of our time serves as a catalyst for open discussion and intellectual inquiry about the world today, underscoring the spirit of Pro Humanitate. For that, we extend our deepest gratitude to all the artists in the Reece Collection for inspiring our students, faculty and staff to glean such benefits from art in which we can also see ourselves.

Finally, we thank all the alumni who served on acquisition committees from 1963 to 2021, each of whom brought their dedication, passion and unique perspective to the process and spent hundreds of hours researching artists to contribute to the legacy of this remarkable collection.

Thanks to the generosity of Alex Acquavella (’03), I am fortunate to be the curator of the Wake Forest Art Collections at this moment, stewarding the Reece Collection into the next decade and working with students and faculty to integrate this extraordinary collection into the curricula and communities of Wake Forest University.

Jennifer Finkel, Ph.D. Acquavella Curator of Collections

I will be forever grateful to Wake Forest art history professor Robert Knott for his enthusiasm and generosity regarding the student-led art acquisition program; the “buying trip,” as it has been colloquially known for years. When I began teaching as an adjunct professor in 1999, I had many conversations with Bob about the program and its enormous benefits to students and to the institution. We marveled at the enriching and unique experience the trip provided, and we shared our thoughts on trends in the art world, emerging philosophies and potentially interesting artists for the students to consider. When Bob, in a seemingly casual way, reached beyond the usual boundaries of hierarchy and status to recommend that I be a participant in the program alongside Professor Jay Curley, I was dumbstruck. To be invited to be a part of this innovative, groundbreaking venture was sheer joy. I am so grateful for his generosity in allowing a then-lecturer to participate in guiding students on the buying trip. Thank you, Bob! We so miss you.

Why

Should Students Buy Art for a University Collection?

Leigh Ann Hallberg (P ’12) Teaching Professor

The students’ sole criterion for selection of artworks for the Reece Collection is to purchase works that “reflect their time” at Wake Forest. “Their time” is a difficult, slippery concept, and I would say students’ understanding of that time evolves as they move forward through the program. There are certain topics that will appear as obvious subject matter, such as identity, war, climate change, migration and so on. Students push deeper into content and each work’s resonance beyond its initial topicality. Do the work’s formal properties support and augment the subject matter and content? Does the work continue to ask questions of the viewer? And on a more pragmatic level, how does this work relate to the existing collection in terms of media, size, the gaps it might fill and our ability to care for and display it.

The question of whether Wake Forest should even be collecting art has been discussed, especially considering the lack of a dedicated space for its presentation. I, too, have thought about the Reece Collection in this light. There is an argument that collecting art is only a means of signaling wealth and status. Obviously, for some people, it is. If you Google “art and money,” the search engine’s results are pages and pages of articles titled, for example:

• “The Three Most Expensive Contemporary Artists of the Year So Far”

• “Top Ten Most Expensive Artworks by Living Artists”

• “The World’s Ten Most Valuable Artworks”

Students need to understand all aspects of the art world, even the coarse and ignorant parts, if they are going to participate in this world. But most importantly, students need to understand that art is about much more than money. As John Berger stated in his BBC television series from 1972, “Ways of Seeing”:

“It’s as if the painting, absolutely still, soundless, becomes a corridor, connecting the moment it represents with the moment at which you are looking at it, and something travels down that corridor at a speed greater than light, throwing into question a way of measuring time itself.”

I cannot imagine trying to teach art, the making of it or its history, without the experience of looking at physical, material, present works of art. Pedagogically, students need access to unmediated examples of what they aspire to make and study. Looking at reproductions or projections of artworks does not allow for an authentic, faithful experience of the work. Seeing works in person makes an enormous difference. When students’ lives are dominated by screens, the experience of relating to a physical work of art is essential. A tiny Instagram image or a small work that has been blown up to fit a projection screen without accurate color and texture is no substitute for apprehending and learning from an actual work of art. Our Reece Collection, which has been carefully and thoughtfully selected by students, encourages discussion, asks questions, gives hope, challenges and creates joy for the entire Wake Forest community.

I have had the pleasure of participating in the Reece Collection program twice, in 2009 with Professor Jay Curley and in 2017. When I think back to 2009, what I recall most vividly are the debates and deliberations. After spending three and a half days pounding the Chelsea pavement, we returned to a rather dark conference room at our hotel to decide what to purchase. A number of works were being considered, but two expensive works were at the core of the discussions: The Sleep of Reason, a large photograph by Yinka Shonibare, and a large cyanotype by Christian Marclay. The students did not have sufficient funds to buy both. I wish I had recorded the conversation! The discourse was intelligent, respectful and INTENSE. I will never forget that discussion. At one point, I made small sketches of all the works being debated on separate cards along with their prices so that the students could create groupings of works that they might purchase within the

budget. Arguments for the Marclay, now an iconic work in the Reece Collection, prevailed. We also purchased a small Shonibare collage that has been exhibited most recently at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in the exhibition substrata. I was immensely proud of those students. The seriousness with which they addressed their task, not in terms of money but in terms of what the artworks purchased would mean to future students, was inspiring.

The program has occurred every four years, and as a rule, seniors and sometimes juniors were chosen as participants. I remember having to reluctantly tell inquiring students that the trip would occur in a year when they, first-years or sophomores, would most likely not be able to participate. It seemed unfair to not consider students who might not be as polished or advanced but who were knowledgeable and enthusiastic. So in 2017, I intentionally sought to carefully review applications of superior students beyond just juniors or seniors. The 2017 students included three seniors, one junior and two sophomores. Previous groups contained odd numbers of participants to break any ties in voting, but the group in 2017 simply coalesced at six, and I asked that all decisions be unanimous. The students agreed. With a generous gift from Wake Forest parents Cathy and Jeff Dishner (P ’21), starting in 2024, the program will occur every three years for the next 15 years, allowing for a greater number of students to experience this amazing opportunity. 2017’s deliberations were also memorable in that then-Provost, Rogan Kersh (’86), was involved. Provost Kersh had always voiced his enthusiasm for the program and invited students to fill him in on the proceedings. When deliberations did come to a unanimous conclusion, the students did not have sufficient funds for shipping the works back to Winston-Salem, and so the students just gave him a ring and asked for a bit more money. Granted! Amazing!

Participants in the student-led art acquisition program have gone on to work in the art world as curators, art educators, artists, gallery directors, gallery accountants, registrars and exhibition managers. This program allowed them to experience and participate in the art world, giving them incomparable insights. The works that they have purchased have given the Wake Forest community an invaluable resource for learning, for contemplation, for debate and for pure enjoyment.

Reflecting the Time: The Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art

John J. Curley Associate Professor of Art

What can the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art tell us about the historical moment in which certain objects were acquired? Certainly, students’ purchasing decisions reveal something of shifting artistic tastes since 1963, but what might they tell us about the social and political events of the time? In other words, how can these works illuminate the “history” part of “art history”? In this short essay, I will investigate these questions using the 1969 and 2021 art-buying trips as short case studies.

The late 1960s were among the most tumultuous years in American history. The protest movement against the Vietnam War was at its height, and the general disregard for authority was particularly strong on college campuses, even among the relatively conservative student body of Wake Forest. In April 1969, just after students from the 1969 buying trip returned from New York, Life magazine’s cover story covered the protests, sometimes violent, erupting on American college campuses. The sheer stylistic variety of the student acquisitions that year, as well as the content of particular works, engages with the nationwide culture of protest in 1969. (See J. D. Wilson’s essay in this volume for his personal recollections of this trip.)

The four students who traveled to New York in 1969 bought more works than any other art-buying trip group. When considered together, the 20 works represent a broad spectrum of artistic styles and practices. This becomes clear when we look at the 1969 trip’s artwork from some of the more famous artists: Paul Cadmus’ careful realism in Male Nude NM 59 from 1968, Adolph Gottlieb’s late example of Abstract Expressionism Green Ground, Blue Disc from 1966, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Hopeless, an exhibition poster from 1967 associated with Pop Art. Lesser-known artists continue this diversity of styles: Hungarian emigré Margit Beck’s lightly colored abstraction, German printmaker Paul Wunderlich’s surrealist figuration and Sidney Goodman’s deadpan depiction of a prosaic gas storage tank. Perhaps the variety and quantity of works can retrospectively reveal

a moment of crisis over the role and function of art and the lack of cultural consensus circa 1969. Put simply, the stylistic chaos within this group of 20 works can mimic the larger social and political confusion of these four college students confronting their contemporary moment.

The content of several of the works purchased in 1969 also directly reflects the social turmoil of the moment.

Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi’s The Involvement III (1967-1968) depicts ghostly, white American planes in a black sky dropping bombs on an already-scorched, blood-red landscape. Jasper Johns produced his more politically subtle lithograph Flags in 1967-1968, featuring the American flag motif he has engaged repeatedly throughout his career. Johns used the optical tricks of complementary colors to make his political point: When viewers stare at the upper, miscolored flag and then shift their focus to the lower gray depiction, human perception creates an afterimage that renders the flag, in the perception of the viewers, in its familiar colors of red, white and blue. Johns seems to suggest that patriotism is something that is both deeply personal, seen only in an individual’s mind’s eye, and just a mere illusion.

Students most recently purchased art for the University during the spring semester of 2021, a time during which Americans were wrestling with another deeply consequential moment in history. First, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the very nature of everyday life. In addition to the trauma of dealing with a new, highly contagious and deadly virus, students’ classes and social lives largely moved online. The art-buying trip was also radically transformed; for the first time, students did not travel to New York and instead met with galleries on Zoom to make selections. Second, the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 led to a profound racial reckoning in the country that, among other things, addressed the structural and institutional effects of white supremacy in America. (The 2021 students

marked this event directly, selecting Jorge Tacla’s May 25, 2020, a blurred rendition of a Black Lives Matter protest in the unsettling medium of pigment mixed with cold wax.) The group’s discussions transcended national politics and artistic strategies; they also critically examined Wake Forest itself, especially the lack of diversity in the Reece Collection. Works by artists of color and women only constituted a small percentage of the overall purchases since 1963. Students in 2021 offered a corrective — beginning to rectify this lack of diversity while also finding works that addressed the ways that the institution of art has long perpetuated histories of exclusion based on race, gender and sexuality.

Students purchased nine works, and none were made by a white-identifying man. This diversity of artists is unparalleled among the other trips: three artists identify as Black, four as members of the LGBTQ+ community, two as South Asian and three as Latinx. The issues presented in Zanele Muholi’s Thandiwe I, Roanoke, Virginia from 2018 can represent the students’ overall aims with their acquisitions. Muholi is a South African photographer who identifies as nonbinary, using the pronouns of they/them. Their photograph is a self-portrait taken about 100 miles from Wake Forest’s Reynolda campus — in Roanoke, Virginia — that depicts the artist with a headdress made of American currency. Not only does the money suggest the violent commodification of the body inherent to the slave trade, but the portraits on the bills themselves suggest a microhistory of American race relations until the Civil War: the so-called father of the country, George Washington, owned enslaved Africans; Alexander Hamilton was born in the eastern Caribbean, and his name is the title of the famous Broadway play that offers a revisionist account of the nation’s founding; Abraham Lincoln was the president during the Civil War who issued the Emancipation Proclamation; and Ulysses S. Grant was the Union general who defeated the Confederacy in 1865. The artist, framed by these white American men,

stares intently at the viewer while standing in a Southern landscape — confronting the picture’s Wake Forest viewers with this racial history while also offering an image of a strong, resilient Black individual who can and will overcome.

Other works also carry a significant political charge. Betty Tompkins’ Women Words (Ingres #3) (2018), offers a deeply unsettling text about misogyny covering the body of a woman in a reproduction of a work by 19th-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; Salman Toor’s The Meeting (2020) riffs on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles and subject matter to think about his identity as a queer Pakistani man in a cosmopolitan world; and Martine Gutierrez presents herself as a bold work of colorful art in a traditional museum in Queer Rage, Don’t Touch the Art (2018). This photograph suggests how stories like hers, a queer Latina with Indigenous heritage, have been ignored in most art museums. These three examples, with at least two others purchased in 2021, explicitly reference past traditional works to help viewers recognize and question art’s historical ties to the institutions of colonialism, misogyny, bigotry and white supremacy. When viewed among other works of art, they force us to reconsider our assumptions about the perceived neutrality of past works of art. They remind us of a vital fact: All art is political.

Since all art is political, we should be mindful that Reece Collection works acquired during less eventful years are as significant as any others. One of the real gifts of these works is that each trip’s selections are a snapshot of the participants’ hopes and fears told through works of contemporary art. If the only charge given to selected students is that the art they purchase reflect the times, the Reece Collection can serve as a window into how students negotiated their own experiences relative to larger social, political and artistic forces.

A Vision for the Arts. A Distinction for Wake Forest.

J. D. Wilson (’69, P ’01)

Those who truly know Wake Forest know it’s a unique place not easily described. It has character and a certain spirit of confidence, often playing above its size, and it feels good just to be there, walking the friendly and friendly-looking campus. It also has had leaders of character, such as Dean Mark Reece, a man of many titles and talents — all centered on students and the student experience. He helped define what makes Wake Forest so special and devoted his life to doing so — as acknowledged by his receiving the Medallion of Merit, Wake Forest’s highest honor for service to the University.

How appropriate it is that the art collection he conceived now bears his name. Like his lifetime of focus on students, the art collection uniquely has students making buying decisions. Early radical collaboration.

So who was Mark Reece?

To me, he was my first recognized mentor, showing me that mentorship is a strong value that defines the Wake Forest experience, as he guided me through campus leadership positions, giving me confidence to do things I had never done and, ultimately, to lead. He impacted my life in countless positive ways, including its trajectory.

To some, he was our version of the iconic Norman Rockwell. They shared similar interesting faces. Sometimes Dean Reece wore a flat cap and tweed jacket with leather-patched elbows. Or smoked a pipe while zipping about campus in his small MG convertible — British racing green. And, of course, Rockwell and Reece both loved and had special connections to the world of art. And golf.

His proudest roles, though, had to be as the spouse of Shirley and father of Mark, John, Lisa and Jordan in their “Leave It to Beaver” home setting on Faculty Drive, where I was a frequent guest. They treated me like family, as Wake Forest does so well.

He was leader of the College Union, now the Student Union. Names changed, as I entered Wake Forest College and graduated from the University. As Wake Forest defines its bold vision of “Wake the Arts,” which I applaud loudly, I see proven seeds of success from the College Union days. Frankly, being involved in College Union was a way to be immersed in the future world of work in a safe campus environment; it was an entrepreneurial and leadership incubator at its core — for all who took advantage of it.

The Major Functions Committee engaged us to plan and execute big concerts of top entertainers in Wait Chapel — from soup to nuts: deciding which artists to get; participating in negotiations, budgeting, contracts, marketing and public relations, and ticket sales; setting up the stage; running the soundboard; and ensuring contractual items were in dressing rooms. We were running a business — with Mark Reece looking over our shoulders, letting us make decisions, guiding us and assisting with challenges. Our entertainers were Simon & Garfunkel, Dionne Warwick, The Lettermen, Ray Charles, Sam & Dave, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Marcel Marceau, Carlos Montoya and more.

Of course, the Arts Committee played a major role in my life, as I was tapped to be one of four students for the 1969 art-buying trip to New York City. Our guides were Dean Reece, Provost Ed Wilson, and Professors Allen Easley and Sterling Boyd.

To make the trip more affordable, I drove my car, and we stopped overnight at Harv Owen’s (’71) home in Pennsylvania. The four of us on that trip were the late Beth Coleman (’71), Leslie Hall Hallenbeck (’72), Harv and me. It was my first (and only) time driving in New York City.

Our days were tightly scheduled, a gallery here, a gallery there, then lunch, then more galleries, then dinner, and then a night in the room of our four elders to defend works on our list, deleting some and taking notes. We had the same intense schedule the next day and then a final vote. In. Out. We also had real-world lessons to learn about staying within our financial limits (about $35,000), as there was a large work by Larry Rivers, now considered by many to be the godfather or grandfather of Pop Art, we chose to give up so we could have the broad range of choices we made — the largest number in the collection. Our instinct to buy Rivers’ work was validated when I visited Williams College Museum of Art in 2009 and the first focal point was an almost identical work by him. It hit me: They had a Rivers and a dedicated art museum.

One of the most memorable highlights of the trip was a visit to the Park Avenue penthouse of Barbara Millhouse, creator of Reynolda House Museum of American Art. She and Winston-Salem native, the late Bob Myers, hosted us for a reception, followed by dinner at an Irish pub. It was the first time I’ve taken an elevator up directly into a home.

High above a transom was a slide projector displaying 10-second views of the latest contemporary art. She used that innovation to show us the importance of contemporary art and how it gives meaning and life to the walls of our homes and special places.

Another memory in her living room happened as I looked down on the coffee table at a picture of R. J. and Katharine Reynolds — reminders that I was in a very special home — when out from the bedroom came a little boy in his pajamas to tell mommy goodnight. That was my introduction to Reynolds Lassiter, her only child, who said goodnight to us as well. Years later, as a young adult, he lived in WinstonSalem, and we served on boards and strategized together on initiatives to benefit Winston-Salem and Wake Forest.

My true introduction to art happened my first days on campus, in 1964, as I viewed the exhibit of works purchased by students that spring. It’s beyond my telling to convey the significance that moment has had on my life. It opened doors for me at Wake Forest and then doors in Winston-Salem, especially at the iconic University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where I received an honorary degree. I was also introduced to Philip Hanes, who became my community mentor, and to Nick Bragg (’58), my arts and historical behind-the-scenes whisperer. I now have a home full of art my wife, Janie, and I have casually “collected.” Creativity and arts have continued as a life theme: Our daughter, Mary Craig Tennille (’01), who chose Wake Forest and a major of studio art, married Andy (’00), a photographer-artist centered on musicians (they met in English class at Wake Forest), and they nurture our arts-loving grandchildren, Olivia and Cy, who treasure visits to Reynolda House and Gardens and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. A prize possession in our personal collection is the program of that 1964 exhibit that opened my eyes to the world of art. In fact, it was Sept. 15, 1964, as noted by me in pencil on the back, which my father taught me to do for experiences I never wanted to forget. The cover is Picasso’s La Femme au Chapeau, from the first purchase year.

These are but a few examples of the effect the Wake Forest experience can have on every student of every major at a unique, world- and life-impacting university. Today, through arts interconnectivity, Mark Reece continues to lead, mentor and inspire us to honor our motto of Pro Humanitate in bold support of Wake the Arts.

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 1960-1969

Pablo Picasso Spanish (1881-1973)

Portrait de Femme a la Fraise et au Chapeau, 1962

Linocut

25" x 17"

1963 Acquisition

Perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso is best known for pioneering Cubism in the visual arts. This experimental new mode of picturing the world fractured the twodimensional picture plane, disrupting once-familiar linear relationships by abstracting, flattening and layering forms. In Portrait de Femme a la Fraise et au Chapeau (Portrait of a Woman with Strawberry and Hat), Picasso represents an unnamed woman from many angles at once. While her hair and nose are depicted in profile, her hat is shown from above and the rest of her face from a slight frontal angle. These conflicting viewpoints and the loose, sketchy quality of the engraving suggest the figure of the woman is perpetually coming into being, shifting and changing before our very eyes. Combined with Picasso’s calculated color palette — with dull browns making up the jagged lines of the composition’s framing device and bright blue and yellow geometric shapes layered over her cheeks — it is her face that draws the viewer’s attention. While the sitter’s identity is unknown, the model bears a close resemblance to Jacqueline Roque (1927-1986), who became Picasso’s second wife when the artist was 79 years old, the year before this print was completed. Because the subject vacillates between a type and an identified person, the twisting spirals at the heart of her pupils become still more enigmatic and unreadable.

Milton Avery American (1885-1965)

Morning News, 1960

Oil wash on paper

23" x 35"

1965 Acquisition

Many modern artists take an interest in everyday materials and situations. Avery said of his practice that he sought “to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter.” Avery continues, “At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.” Avery brings this dual project to bear in Morning News, exploring it with his signature play of solidcolor bands. A blond figure with pale gray skin and white clothing sits on a coral couch. The figure holds an open newspaper that lends the work its title; the novel color combinations further nuance the “news” of the title, as does Avery’s choice to cast the image in the soft hues of morning light. An uneven horizon line bisects the background of the painting, emerging where an upper field of pink meets a lower field of black. Avery’s work subtly influenced American abstraction, never fully breaking with figurative representation but neither allowing rigid conventions of depth and perspective to distract him from his real focus: the relationships between colors.

Leonard Baskin

American (1922-2000)

Lucas Van Leyden, 1963

Etching

16 ¼" x 21 5/8"

1966 Acquisition

Hans Erni

Swiss (1909-2015)

Le Couple Endormi, 1965

Lithograph

22" x 30"

1969 Acquisition

Robert Vickrey

American (1926-2011)

Head of a Clown, 1960

Sanguine ink on paper

24" x 20"

1965 Acquisition

Richard Anuszkiewicz

American (1930-2020)

Untitled, 1963

Acrylic emulsion paint on cardboard 18" x 18"

1963 Acquisition

A leader in the Op (Optical) Art movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Anuszkiewicz constructs optical illusions in his abstract polymer paintings. In this untitled 1963 work, Anuszkiewicz arranges lines at regular angles, generating squares in several planes of negative space in the painting. The lines are white and yellow, arranged before a red-orange background. Anuszkiewicz refined the “color-line mixer” technique in his illusory paintings, manipulating the viewer’s perceptions through the use of color and shape so that the center of the piece appears to emit light. Speaking to the quasihypnotic effect of his compositions, Anuszkiewicz said, “I’m interested in making something romantic out of a very, very mechanistic geometry.” Viewers can evaluate the success of Anuszkiewicz’s romantic project for themselves, but art history bears out his claims to a mechanistic geometry of colors: The artist and color theorist Josef Albers mentored Anuszkiewicz. The mathematical precision of Anuszkiewicz’s Untitled provokes the viewer’s optical perceptions with scientific insights, but his play with color and his invocation of the viewer’s body give concerns of the subjective equal force in the painting.

Ruth Clarke

American (1909-1981)

Big Mountain, 1963

Oil on canvas

43 ¾" x 48 ¼"

1964 Acquisition

Paul Jenkins

American (1923-2012)

Phenomena September Morn, 1964

Acrylic on canvas

20" x 36"

1965 Acquisition

Paul Wunderlich

German (1927-2010)

Joanna in a Chair, 1968

Lithograph

25 ½" x 19 ¾"

1969 Acquisition

Sidney Goodman

American (1936-2013)

White Gas Tank, 1968

Charcoal on paper

26" x 40"

1969 Acquisition

Antonio Frasconi

American (1919-2013)

The Involvement III, 1967

Woodcut and mixed media

36" x 24"

1969 Acquisition

Green Ground, Blue Disc, 1966

Screenprint 24" x 18"

1969 Acquisition

Adolph Gottlieb helped pioneer Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s with his paintings, prints and sculptures. The artist’s minimalistic visual language took inspiration from the aesthetics of Surrealism and reformulated symbols recalling ancient myth and indigenous imagery. By the late 1950s, Gottlieb had developed his signature Burst series: flat, elemental fields of color containing a floating sphere hovering above a gestural mass. Green Ground, Blue Disc comes from this series, which ultimately centered experiments in color and form via a radically simplified image pattern. Vibrant and energetic, the palette of emerald green, sky blue and golden yellow evokes the colors of a lush summertime landscape. Looking to the environmental movement, which was newly emergent during this time, scholars have interpreted Gottlieb’s earthly imagery — with its unstable and vibrating forms — in accord with the new awareness of Earth’s fragility.

Adolph Gottlieb American (1903-1974)

Ben Shahn

American (1898-1969)

Flowering Brushes, 1963

Lithograph

39 ¾" x 26 ½"

1969 Acquisition

Ben Shahn

American (1898-1969)

Wheat Field, 1958

Screenprint

27" x 40 1/8"

1969 Acquisition

Ben Shahn was born in presentday Lithuania in 1898 to an Orthodox Jewish family. As a child, he witnessed anti-Semitism and political persecution, experiences that became dominating influences in his work. In 1906, he immigrated with his family to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. A successful painter and printmaker, his work focused primarily on social and political issues, often protesting against social injustice and honoring ordinary people in their suffering.

Shahn’s 1958 lithograph Wheat Field remembers his time as a photographer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s WPA-funded Farm Security Administration. During this period, he immersed himself in the austere realities of Depressionera farming. His photographs from this assignment advanced the agency’s moral mission to educate the American populace in rural economic and social reform. Looking back on this time, Wheat Field depicts a flattened row of ripe wheat. The elongated verticals of the stalks rise from the bottom of the composition in straight lines before crossing a third of the way up. The negative space around these entangled stalks creates a series of elongated diamond shapes, 27 of which Shahn hand-colored in bright earth tones. A poetic metaphor for the communities that are grown from hundreds of striving individuals, Wheat Field is an offering to the stained-glass beauty of the American farm.

Shahn included a later version of Wheat Field in an artist’s book he made a decade later, an illustrated version of the Book of Ecclesiastes. There, the stylized and flattened wheat accompanies this verse: “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest.” Illustrating this book from the Old Testament was a passion project for Shahn, allowing him to reflect on his Jewish ancestry following the persecutions of World War II.

Ben Shahn

American (1898-1969)

For the Sake of a Single Verse (folio), 1968

Lithograph 22 ¾" x 17 ¾" each

1969 Acquisition

These lithographs are part of Shahn’s For the Sake of a Single Verse, which includes 24 folio illustrations the artist made to accompany Rainer Maria Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). The Austrian poet’s semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of a college student from an aristocratic but destitute Danish family living in Paris in the early 1900s. Deploying an experimental format of plotless diary entries, Notebooks explores Paris’ gritty undercurrents of poverty and sorrow. The novel made a profound impression on Shahn, who first read it as a young man in the 1920s. And while Rilke’s expressionistic prose stayed with Shahn all his life, the artist did not create illustrations for the book until 1968 — a year before his death. Shahn published his illustrated version of Rilke’s novel in a limited print run of 750 copies. His frontispiece, an abstracted view of a twisting, contorted series of Parisian skyscrapers, foreshadows the urban scene and labyrinthine prose that follows. Other illustrations include a field of blooming flowers, the graphic outline of a hand holding a pen, a tiger and a dove.

Nathan Cabot Hale

American (1925-2021)

Fire of Spring, 1969

Welded nickel and silver sculpture

27" x 11" x 9"

1969 Acquisition

Milton Resnick

American (1917-2004)

Untitled, 1960

Oil on paper

25 ¾" x 20 ¼"

1963 Acquisition

Joe Lasker

American (1919-2015)

Yucatan Holiday, 1962

Oil on canvas

47" x 38"

1969 Acquisition

J.W. Edwards

American (b. 20th century)

Dream World, c. 1963

Oil on canvas

18" x 24"

1963 Acquisition

Robert Burkert

American (1930-2019)

The Screen Comedians portfolio, 1966-1967

Serigraph

A. Harry Langdon

20 ½" x 33 ½"

B. Buster’s World 18 ½" x 30"

C. Chaplin 18" x 33 ¼"

D. Fatty Arbuckle 21" x 31"

E. The Interior (with Stan and Ollie) 21 ½" x 31"

F. Harold Lloyd

21" x 30 ½"

23"

1969 Acquisition

G. The Street (with Mae West)

x 31"

H. Fractured City (Marx Brothers) 32" x 20 ½"

I. William Claude Dukinfield 30 ½" x 22 ¾"

American (1915-1991)

Blue and Green, 1969

Handwoven wool

116" x 96"

1969 Acquisition

Robert Motherwell

Harold Altman

American (1924-2003)

Profile, 1969

Lithograph

22 ¼" x 30"

1969 Acquisition

Charles Cajori

American (1921-2013)

Small Figure, 1962

Oil on canvas

20 ¼" x 18 ¼"

1963 Acquisition

George McNeil

American (1908-1995)

Longing, 1962-1963

Oil on plywood

20" x 26"

1963 Acquisition

Paul Cadmus

American (1904-1999)

Male Nude NM 59, 1969

Crayon on hand-toned paper 22 ½" x 21"

1969 Acquisition

History celebrates Paul Cadmus for egg tempera paintings, but he also produced scores of finished crayon drawings like Male Nude NM 59. Cadmus articulates the figure’s facial features with realistic fidelity. His hair is more abstract. The nude’s closed eyes and mild smile convey peace and pleasure in equal measure. Cadmus exaggerates the musculature of the model, contorting his subject’s form and treating his skin in white-gray. Cadmus was a gay man, and his textured sex life emerges as source material for some biographical and art historical analysis of the artist. Male Nude NM 59 indeed hearkens the Renaissance vision of masculine beauty conjured by Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, which has been read through the lens of the artist’s sexuality, though Cadmus preferred the drawings of Signorelli and Mantegna (Michelangelo’s contemporaries). Cadmus also contrasts the deep detail of his figure drawing with an unrealistic sense of place in Male Nude NM 59, blurring the lines between real and unreal in the magical realist style he explored in his practice.

John Waddill

American (1927-2013)

Untitled, 1963 Polymer on paper 23 ½" x 22 ¼"

1963 Acquisition

Darell Koons

American (1924-2016)

Sunday Morning, 1963 Polymer and tempera on panel 17" x 35"

1965 Acquisition

Pablo Picasso

Spanish (1881-1973)

L’Ecuyere (The Horsewoman), 1960

Lithograph

21" x 27"

1963 Acquisition

Robert Broderson

American (1920-1992)

Child with Flower, 1963

Lithograph 24" x 18"

1963 Acquisition

Jasper Johns

American (b. 1930)

Flags, 1967-1968

Lithograph

35" x 26"

1969 Acquisition

Two years after his discharge from the U.S. Army, in 1954, Jasper Johns had a dream of the nation’s flag. The dream inspired over 40 of Johns’ works over subsequent decades, including this 1967-1968 lithograph. In the print, Johns positions two U.S. flags atop a field of rough gray. The flag in the upper half of the image bears green and black stripes, with black stars filling a bank of orange in the upperleft corner. The bottom border of the print truncates the lower flag, omitting two of the 13 stripes. On the one hand, Flags aligns Johns’ contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists, the tactile surface of the print suggesting a handmade and bespoke quality that implies Johns’ physical contact with the image. On the other hand, Johns cedes his authority over the interpretation of this work to the ready recognizability of the flag and smoothly replicates the picture through the lithographic process. Johns said, “Using this [flag] design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. I went on to similar things like the targets, things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels.” Flags contains at least one deliberate perceptual trick: Staring at the white circle in the center of the green, orange and black flag produces an afterimage of red, white and blue over the grayed one. Other editions of Flags appear in the collections of MoMA and the Walker Arts Center.

Claude Howell

American (1915-1997)

Two Market Women, 1962

Oil on canvas

50" x 36"

1966 Acquisition

Isabel Bishop

American (1902-1988)

Study for Drinking Fountain, 1964

Oil on Masonite

15" x 12"

1965 Acquisition

Like several artists whose work appears in the Reece Collection, the painter Isabel Bishop practices social realism and is best recognized for portraits and urban landscape paintings that capture everyday public moments. Bishop composes Study for Drinking Fountain as a system of scratchy lines of blue and yellow-brown oil paint, exposing canvas beneath each brushstroke. A faintly defined figure appears in the center of Bishop’s study, bending over at the waist to drink from a water fountain. Bishop produced paintings and drawings of figures at public drinking fountains as early as 1947. Perhaps more than other iterations, however, the 1964 Study for Drinking Fountain reminds viewers that political phenomena seep into scenes of everyday life. Bishop’s central figure has brown skin and dark hair, and 1964 was a landmark year in the history of American civil rights. Specific attributes of the figure fade into Bishop’s color scheme, leaving their race and gender somewhat ambiguous, but the painting nevertheless encapsulates the problematic discourse surrounding the spatial rights of Black Americans in the 1960s. Raising the racial politics of public works, Study for Drinking Fountain necessitates reflection on the civic contours of Bishop’s practice.

Francis Speight

American (1896-1989)

Holy Family Church, 1942

Oil on canvas

24" x 30"

1964 Acquisition

John Hartell

American (1902-1995)

Vignette, 1962

Oil on canvas

30" x 32"

1963 Acquisition

Joseph Heil

American (1916-1974)

Autumn, 1961

Collage

6" x 7"

1963 Acquisition

William Lidh

American (1925-1999)

Garden of the Psyche, 1963

Woodcut

60" x 26"

1964 Acquisition

Margit Beck

Hungarian American (1918-1997)

Winter Slopes, 1965

Acrylic on canvas

50" x 60"

1969 Acquisition

Reginald Marsh

American (1898-1954)

Bowery Group, 1950

Chinese ink on paper

31" x 22"

1970 Acquisition

Reginald Marsh’s claims that “well-bred people are no fun to paint” and “wealthy people pay to disguise themselves” appear widely in the historical literature surrounding the artist. Marsh’s work often investigates the uneasy proximity of whimsy and darkness in public culture, especially in densely populated New York. Often positioned in the genealogies of political caricaturists like the British Hogarth and the French Daumier, Marsh’s work balances the humorous, insidious and salacious facets of an urban working-class existence in equal parts. Marsh made the double-sided inkbrush drawing Bowery Group late in his career. Marsh composes the image of organized lines that celebrate the smooth diffusion of ink on paper. Spectral architecture sets the stage: a working-class urban street. A woman strolls in the foreground. A man, possibly drunk, sits against the frame of a building, looking in the woman’s direction. Other men, silhouetted in the background, join him in leering at her. A seemingly straightforward scene, Bowery Group recapitulates the ancient moral conflict of innocence and vice on urban streets, interlacing it with the mid-century complexities of gender.

Garo Antreasian American (1922-2018)

From the Silver Suite, 1968

Lithograph

21 3/8" x 19 7/16"

1969 Acquisition

Robert Gwathmey

American (1903-1988)

Untitled, 1969

Poster

26" x 18"

1969 Acquisition

Roy Lichtenstein

American (1923-1997)

Kunsthalle, Bern Exhibition Poster – Hopeless, 1967

Printed 1967 by Albin Uldry, Bern

Serigraph

50" x 36"

1969 Acquisition

Anne Kesler Shields

American (1932-2012)

Red and Blue, 1964

Oil on canvas

52" x 40"

1964 Acquisition

Elaine de Kooning American (1918-1989)

Portrait of Eddie #2, 1961 Oil on Masonite

13" x 9"

1963 Acquisition

A noted Abstract Expressionist, Elaine de Kooning favors a gestural application of paint, composing her 1961 Portrait of Eddie #2 of overlapping color bands. A male figure, Eddie, sits on an unpictured stool before a background of reaching bands of blue and light brown. He wears a reddish jacket, a green shirt, and brown pants and shoes. Hands folded in his lap, he properly crosses his left leg over his right. De Kooning made several paintings of her proteges Eddie Johnson and Robert Corless in the early 1960s. Histories of de Kooning’s career often omit the voices of Johnson and Corless, but these trainees supported some of de Kooning’s most significant sittings; Johnson once photographed de Kooning as she painted a portrait of John F. Kennedy. De Kooning brings geometric precision to her subject’s face, but runny trails of paint anonymize her student’s features, destabilizing the notion that recognizable likeness must power portraiture. De Kooning renders the Eddie of this portrait recognizable only through her title and perhaps the quirks of her student’s physicality. De Kooning said, “Always when I look at anyone’s art, I get flashes of the person. … To me all art is self-portraits.” In its distinctive relaying of de Kooning’s style and its relative effacement of the subject’s distinguishing features, this painting seems to challenge its own title: Is this a portrait of Eddie or Elaine?

Birgit “Gitte” Krøncke

Danish (b. 1935)

Manhattan, 1963

Oil on canvas

26" x 32"

1963 Acquisition

Grace Cranford Freund

American (1922-2013)

Intruders, c. 1965

Polymer on canvas

48 1/4" x 42"

1965 Acquisition

Stanley William Hayter

British (1901-1988)

Unstable Woman, 1947

Etching

20" x 26"

1963 Acquisition

“My approach to art,” Stanley Hayter said, “is fundamentally experimental.” The British printmaker’s revolutionary reinvention of traditional gravure techniques triggered a renaissance of the process in the 20th century. Previously, artists had employed gravure as a means of reproduction; Hayter transformed the long-established technique with inventiveness and originality. Dozens of artists, including Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, came to Hayter’s famous Atelier 17 print workshop to learn from him. Unstable Woman reflects Hayter’s interest in color prints in the later decades of his career. The relationship between the female nude — the subject of the work — and the linear, spiraling background produces the “instability” of the woman, who appears to move counterclockwise. Although Hayter abstracts her body, it maintains its figurative specificity. Hayter also uses jarring shades of cobalt blue, bright fuchsia and banana yellow to create rhythm with repetitions of line and shape. Reflective of mid-20th-century Jet Age aesthetics, Unstable Woman embodies the experimental and edgy ideals of an era.

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 1970-1979

Alex Katz

American (b. 1927)

Vincent with Open Mouth, 1970

Oil on canvas

96" x 72"

1973 Acquisition

Alex Katz is one of the most widely exhibited artists of his generation. Often associated with the Pop Art movement, his large-scale portraits were influenced by the graphic close-ups found in television, film and advertising that were exploding into American visual culture during the 1950s and ’60s. In Katz’s portrait Vincent with Open Mouth, the artist depicts his 10-year-old son in the stylized, flattened planes of color that mark his mature work. In a 2009 interview, the artist recalled his dependence on photography to plan such compositions, saying, “Photographs had the two things I was interested in: one, they were flat, and the other, they had nostalgia. I was trying to make something new, and flatness seemed the way to go.” The boy’s bulbous head takes up the majority of the frame. And his face, with its enigmatic expression, is so immediate it seems almost to push out from the surface of the canvas. Is his mouth open in wonder? Or are those eyes glazed with boredom? As with many of Katz’s best pictures, the painter creates a tension between the intimate and the remote, the overwhelming and the absurd. An enormous and all-consuming canvas (8 feet tall and 6 feet wide), it foregrounds what Katz called the colossal and epic “visual dominance” of the human figure in all its mundane expressions and quotidian environs.

Red Grooms

American (b. 1937)

Picasso Goes to Heaven,

1973-1976

Etching/Pochoir

28 7/8" x 30"

1977 Acquisition

Best known for his assemblages and painted installations, Red Grooms’ Picasso Goes to Heaven is crowded with big personalities and costumed characters from Picasso’s imagined afterlife. In a work begun shortly after the artist’s death in 1973, Picasso is depicted front and center with a gigantic golden halo, a hairy chest and strappy sandals. Seated on a swing held up by cherubs, Picasso glides through a melange of clowns, monkeys, nude women, trumpet players and French bureaucrats. Bumping up against the right edge of the frame, a red-faced Paul Cézanne holds a painter’s palette while he draws a single red apple on the white canvas before him. To the left of Cézanne’s easel, Gertrude Stein wears a severe Victorian gown and holds a platter of apples. Her mannish features and tiny angel wings complete the satirical tableau. A zany, cartoonish scene teeming with chaotic life, Grooms’ caricature of the 20th-century artist is just plain fun. As Grooms said, “Humor is like boxing. You set ’em up. Then, whammo!”

9" x 9" each

1977 Acquisition

Since the 1950s, Robert Mangold has explored line and color on supports ranging in shape, size and dimension. A committed Minimalist, his practice responded in a coolly strategic way to Abstract Expressionism, which dominated the American art scene throughout the mid-20th century. Working within a consistent geometric vocabulary, his spare and subtle works — from paintings and prints to constructions and glassworks — employ monochromatic abstraction as a means of communication. Five Aquatints establishes underlying order and pattern by building relationships between purely abstract geometries. Subtle changes take place as the earth-toned squares brighten over the course of the print sequence. The contrasting light and dark, straight and arching lines set up complex spatial connections that affect the way we perceive the implied dimensionality in each square. Derived from the principles of geometric science, Five Aquatints challenges the illusionistic limits of the two-dimensional print medium.

Robert Mangold American (b. 1937) Five Aquatints, 1975 Aquatint

Fairfield Porter

American (1907-1975)

Under the Elms, 1971

Lithograph

32 ¼" x 24 ½"

1977 Acquisition

Fairfield Porter, a post-war representational painter, struggled for recognition during the Abstract Expressionist heyday of the mid-20th century. His portraits, landscapes and still lifes reflect traditionally realistic subject types rendered in unmodeled and soft-edged forms. Under the Elms is a lithograph after Porter’s oil on canvas original of the same year, now in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Scholars have identified the figure as Porter’s daughter, Katherine, and the house in the background as the artist’s Southampton studio. The rippling patterns of dappled sunlight on the lawn and in the shapes of the trees are reminiscent of plein air paintings by Impressionists, who were obsessed with capturing the changing light conditions found in nature. Porter’s practice was similarly based in the direct observation of his world and in his delight of everyday beauty. But unlike his 19th-century precedents, Porter’s works embrace flatness and abstracted shapes as intrinsic to the representational medium.

Bob Timberlake

American (b. 1937)

Near Boone, no date

Offset print

12" x 16 ¾"

1977 Acquisition

Robert Rauschenberg

American (1925-2008)

Visitation II, 1965

Lithograph

30" x 22"

1977 Acquisition

Robert Rauschenberg embraces rough edges across sculpture, painting and printmaking. Rough-hewn black strokes dominate the surface of Visitation II. Triangles, rectangles and a target emerge in saturated black.

Rauschenberg identified the inspiration for the Visitation prints as his experience walking in the city, in which “all you saw was a general no-colour in which the tone stood out.”

Rauschenberg includes a photorealistic image of a kitchen right of center, positioning a scene of domesticity within his tonal impression of urban movement. His title references the Christian scene in which Mary, pregnant with Jesus, meets Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. A reticent contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists and an out queer man, Rauschenberg appropriates the trappings of mainstream culture — from consumerism to religiosity to the experiments of his fellow artists — dragging them with love through a rigorous reexamination.

Visitation II replicates the general forms of Visitation I (1965), a similar but nonidentical print produced on gridded graph paper.

Rauschenberg favored “multiples” and seriality, which problematize artistic originality. A quintessential Rauschenbergian print, other editions of Visitation II appear in the collections of The Met, MoMA, Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Ron Davis

American (b. 1937)

Diamond in a Box, 1975

Acrylic on canvas

114 ½" x 133 ¾"

1977 Acquisition

Ron Kleemann

American (1937-2014)

The Four Horsemen and the Soho Saint, 1976

Screenprint

37 ½" x 41"

1977 Acquisition

Alfred Leslie

American (1927-2023)

Richard Bellamy, 1974

Lithograph

40" x 30"

1977 Acquisition

Jim Dine

Warm Drypoint Robe, 1976 Drypoint

42" x 29 ¾"

1977 Acquisition

Jim Dine’s sprawling multimedia practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, poetry and performance. Across four decades and many different types of media, Dine developed the specific form of the bathrobe as a repeated motif. This everyday object, transformed into a noble subject by the artist, functions as an imaginative self-portrait of Dine himself. The Warm Drypoint Robe print in the Reece Collection uses an extraordinary variety of textures and marks to produce an expressive image evoking a wellused and cozy robe. Loose scratches across the surface of the fabric lend the work the unfinished, casual quality of a handmade object, bringing our attention to its facture. With the arms of the robe hitched up in an attitude of attention, the wrapped cloth takes on an anthropomorphic pose full of character, as if it has a life of its own. Printmaking is a central part of Dine’s practice, and he is recognized as an extraordinary draftsman. Over his long career, he made more than 1,000 prints, including etchings, lithographs and woodcuts.

American (b. 1935)

Louise Nevelson

American (1899-1988)

Night Zag III, 1973

Wood assemblage

34 ½" x 42 ½" x 4"

1973 Acquisition

Night Zag III typifies Louise Nevelson’s monumental, monochromatic wall-hanging sculptures, which the artist called “zags.” The zag sculptures exemplify Nevelson’s contributions to the mid20th-century Junk Art phenomenon. She built Night Zag III by collecting dozens of found pieces of discarded wood and organizing them into tidy but irregular grids before painting the entire composition in matte black. Despite its asymmetry, Night Zag III affords the viewer a sense of order and cohesion, systematizing rectilinear chambers, saw-toothed and curving strips, and recognizable objects like a cutting board in a bounded polygonal form. Nevelson produced some of her zags in other colors but readily admitted black was her favorite. The artist challenged the common Western association of black with fear and death, explaining, “When I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance.” Just as each piece of found wood has a story of its own but finds its place in Nevelson’s unification, so, too, does every perceptible color find welcome in Nevelson’s capacious understanding of black. In their complex arrangement of geometric shapes, the zags reference Cubist collages, musical compositions, Maya stelae, and the urban architecture and dynamism of New York City.

Jules Olitski

American (1922-2007)

First Years, 1970

Acrylic on canvas

94" x 23"

1973 Acquisition

Russian-born American artist Jules Olitski was at the forefront of Color Field painting, an abstractionist movement of the 1960s and ’70s made popular by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. His large-scale abstract paintings feature misty fields of solid color with little depth and no perspective. Working on uncut rolls of canvas with buckets of paint, spray guns, sponges and squeegees, he used spray and impasto techniques to create richly textured color surfaces. First Years is a color field framed at the edges of the canvas by brushstrokes in white and salmon pink. These marks communicate the edge of the painting and define its surface. Olitski built up successive layers of acrylic paint on the canvas, gradually changing the balance of hue and value in a fragile pinkish color reminiscent of Tiffany glass. A pale reddish spray covers some areas, adding further dimension by alluding to the subtle play of light. Together these elements create a virtually boundless, eye‐filling terrain — a dematerialized field of pure color.

American (1925-1981)

Christ Head Tondo, c. 1970

Drawing

23 ½" x 18"

1970 Acquisition

Ray Prohaska

American (1901-1981)

Floats and Markers, 1964

Oil on canvas

50" x 40"

1971 Acquisition

A.B. Jackson

American (1928-2011)

Untitled, 1963

Acrylic on paper

14" x 17"

1973 Acquisition

Helen Frankenthaler was an Abstract Expressionist painter. This untitled acrylic painting on paper typifies the mode of painting, which Frankenthaler began exploring in the early 1950s and for which she would become best recognized. Her work was a direct inspiration for Color Field painting which utilizes the application of paint to large areas of canvas at a time, often engaging the canvas at odd angles to exploit gravity and the viscous materiality of paint. Frankenthaler applied a narrow field of blue and a wide field of red atop the mild base, seeking to satisfy her conviction that “A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image.” While Frankenthaler enjoyed acclaim and relative success as a mid-century female artist, her male contemporaries received more market and critical attention at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Surging historical interest in recuperating Frankenthaler from misogynistic canon formation in recent decades marks the prescience of this early accession to the Reece Collection.

Helen Frankenthaler

William T. Wiley

American (1937-2021)

Near the Red Pit, 1975

Drawing

36" x 37"

1977 Acquisition

Jack Beal

American (1931-2013)

Oysters, Wine, and Lemons, 1974

Lithograph

20 1/8" x 33"

Study For Oysters, Wine, and Lemons, 1974

Pastel on paper

19 5/8" x 25 ½"

1977 Acquisition

Ellsworth Kelly

American (1923-2015)

Colored Paper Images XVI (Blue Yellow Red), 1976

Colored and pressed paper pulp

32 ¼" x 21 ¼"

Edition 4 of 24

1977 Acquisition

Ellsworth Kelly relishes in tidy spectra of monochromatic stripes in his paintings and prints alike. Colored Paper Images XVI (Blue Yellow Red) adheres to this rule. Kelly stacks horizontal bands of blue atop yellow atop red. Kelly uses colored pulp rather than smooth industrial paper, centering the square of pigment on rough-edged paper that holds visual weight. Kelly’s work straddles the striated celebrations of color put forth by Abstract Expressionists and the neat geometries of American Minimalism. He asserted, “My forms are geometric, but they don’t interact in a geometric sense. They’re just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don’t see them.” Kelly studied at the Pratt Institute before enlisting in the mountain ski troops and the camouflage unit for World War II, which shaped his relationship with color. After the war, he continued his education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Perhaps he encountered the specific orientation of blue over yellow over red — the oldest configuration of the national flag of Romania — during his military service and European education, though the homology could be coincidental.

Philip Pearlstein

American (1924-2022)

Nude on Striped Hammock, 1974

Etching and aquatint

23 ½" x 26"

1977 Acquisition

Philip Pearlstein was one of the preeminent American figure painters of the 20th century. He is best known for his unidealized nudes, which usually consist of one or two figures set against a stark background with only a piece of furniture and a patterned rug or blanket as supporting props. Like many of his works, Nude on Striped Hammock is notable for its use of assertive cropping — an influence, perhaps, from his early work as a layout artist at Life magazine. The print depicts a woman suspended in a hammock in the artist’s studio, one foot on the floor. From this high vantage point, we can see a section of baseboard at the composition’s upper left. A web of shadow pools on the floor below, cast by three separate light sources. Pearlstein’s overall approach to composing his almost clinically realistic nudes was not to eroticize or sexualize their bodies but, instead, to treat the figure as, he said, “the main form of my compositional structures.” He continued, “I see the arms and legs and torsos primarily as directional movements, their contoured areas as the major shapes on my page.” This depersonalization of the human body allows the life of his works to come from the abstract two-dimensional patterns created by shapes within the picture plane.

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 1980-1989

Robert Colescott

American (1925-2009)

Famous Last Words: The Death of a Poet, 1988

Acrylic on cotton duck

84" x 72"

1989 Acquisition

Robert Colescott’s figurative paintings confront stereotypes while celebrating Black history. His garishly colorful Famous Last Words: The Death of a Poet centers the last moments of the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first influential Black poets in American literature. The poet lies in the foreground of the composition, tucked beneath a green and red quilt. With a cigarette between his fingers, the dying Dunbar speaks the memories of his life into a microphone. These are the stories given flesh in the surrounding painting, where Dunbar himself is rendered at least three more times. Each time, he’s shown with a cigarette clenched between his teeth: in bed with a lover, in heartfelt conversation with a blond woman and in a mortal struggle with a gun-toting man. People of many colors populate Colescott’s painting, some with mottled skin tones, suggesting one race shifting into another. In a frenetic composition packed with interlocking forms, their couplings and struggles evoke a mixture of emotions, from pain to desire, love to hate. Of his paintings, Colescott asserted, “I talk about the sociology of race and sex,” and he claimed, “You can’t talk about race without talking about sex in America.” His garish and gritty recollection of a poet’s life — punctuated by sex and violence — provocatively engaged racial stereotypes still prominent in 1980s America. Three years after its installation in Benson University Center, the painting was vandalized: The body of the blond-haired lover in bed with the poet was defaced with black felt-tip pen. The artist traveled to Wake Forest to restore the painting.

Richard Diebenkorn

American (1922-1993)

Blue Club, 1981

Aquatint, spit bite, soft ground etching

37 ½" x 31"

1989 Acquisition

The artist Richard Diebenkorn is best known for a group of large-scale, luminous canvases that brought abstraction to the West Coast. Called the Ocean Park paintings, the soft-hued series took inspiration from the special luminosity of the California landscape Diebenkorn called home. Blue Club comes from the later decades of the artist’s career, when he played with combinations of abstraction and figuration. He began to draw playing-card imagery in the mid-1970s, focusing in particular on clubs and spades. Of his lifelong fascination with the iconic imagery found in playing cards, Diebenkorn said, “I had always used these signs in my work almost from my beginnings.” As a child, he invented family emblems from heraldic signs — like spades — and painted them onto homemade shields.

While his early abstract paintings incorporated clubs and spades peripherally, this new series dealt with them, he said, “directly — as theme and variation.” For Diebenkorn, such symbols had “a much greater emotional charge than I realized.”

Along with his strong sense of compositional balance, Blue Club reveals a fine sense of gestural line and sensitivity to color, lending this simple image the weight of deeper meaning.

Jody Pinto

American (b. 1942)

Henri: Renaissance Clamming, 1983 Crayon, watercolor, gouache on paper 96" x 60"

1985 Acquisition

Jody Pinto’s creative projects primarily focus on the integration of sitespecific artworks into architecture and landscape. Deriving from her practice as a painter, Henri: Renaissance Clamming is part of her Henri series, a group of works inspired by Pinto’s neighbor and childhood hero, Henri LaMothe. An Olympic swimmer, jokester and unqualified daredevil, Henri once built a 40-foot platform over a shallow pool so he could perform the death-defying feat of a four-story belly flop. In this particular work on paper, Henri’s dangling feet are visible, descending from the rough yellow clump of fireworks suspended in the sky. In the red-washed water below, two back-turned figures look on in silhouette. Inspired by the mystical imagery of Giotto and fresco paintings of the Italian Renaissance, Pinto has said that she imagined Henri to be her own personal saint. These references suggest we read the yellow mass of fireworks as evocative of an angel or crucifix. Fantastical, enigmatic and highly personal, Henri: Renaissance Clamming is an elemental ode to the magical people who populate our daily lives with drama and mystery.

Keith Haring

American (1958-1990)

Untitled, 1982

Dayglo paint and ink on paper

38 ¼" x 48"

1985 Acquisition

Keith Haring began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the 1980s, and the city informs much of his work. He approached the streets as a laboratory for his dayglo and ink creations, and Haring’s work often relies on line images of stick figures. For the dichromatic Untitled, Haring represents a breakdancer in his recognizable style, inking the details of the image onto a solid yellow background. The sole figure in the painting performs a backbend, with curving lines above and below the figure suggesting motion of the body. Haring marks the ground by a horizon line and offers dots for texture. He dates the work “1982” in the top-left corner and adds a cross-hatched circle in the top right, a symbol that is part of the artist’s personal pictorial vocabulary. This dayglo work on paper was prominently featured in Haring’s infamous 1982 exhibition at the prominent Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo, where the artist transformed the gallery into a club-like environment, covering every inch of every wall, from floor to ceiling, with paintings, drawings, wallpaper and graffiti. Like most of the figures in Haring’s oeuvre, the central figure of Untitled eludes identification as any specific individual. Such images of the dancing body could reference the dancers on the street or in the nightclub, as both spaces influenced Haring and other gay creatives in 1980s New York. The playful spirit central to so many of Haring’s paintings often belies life-and-death political stakes; the artist made big, loud artworks opposing Apartheid, drug abuse and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies and advocating safe sex practices in response to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic. While this painting does not engage such macro-political forces in any direct way, the untitled 1982 work foregrounds joy and movement — indeed life itself — in Haring’s urban surrounds and queer communities.

Allan Erdmann

American (1931-2012)

Ives, 1979

Electronic sculpture

39 3/8" x 3 ½"

1981 Acquisition

Ed Paschke

American (1939-2004)

Rouge Clair, 1984

Mixed media

40" x 60"

1985 Acquisition

James Surls

American (b. 1943)

A Certain Great Angel, 1980

Carved and burned wood sculpture

138" x 84" x 54"

1981 Acquisition

Joseph Raffael

American (1933-2021)

Pink Lily with Dragonfly, 1981

Lithograph

41" x 29 ½"

1981 Acquisition

Kathlyn Sullivan

American (b. 1943)

Compulsive Log Cabin, 1986

Machine pieced, hand-quilted

48" x 48"

1987 Acquisition

John Monti

American (b. 1957)

Stand In, 1988

Charcoal on paper

62" x 27"

1989 Acquisition

American (1923-2015)

What is Paradise, 1980

Acrylic and collage on paper

60" x 50"

1981 Acquisition

A flagbearer of Second-Wave feminism in the arts, Miriam Schapiro worked to recuperate diverse materials and techniques sidelined by the historical supremacy of painting and sculpture. “We really didn’t have any literature telling us it was a good thing to be a woman artist,” Schapiro said, and that “was something to get really angry about.” While the artist’s What is Paradise is an acrylic painting on canvas, the work breaks with pictorial conventions and repopulates painting with the feminized artistic forms of floral arrangement, mosaic and woven textile. Meticulous floral motifs, some smooth and others composed of many tiny tiles of paint, stand starkly against a black base. Schapiro adds ornamental columns and a rectangular border to frame the painting in further nods to the feminized sphere of decorative arts. Produced in the decade following her 1970s pioneering of femmage (feminist collage) and the success of the Womanhouse (1970) exhibition she co-organized with Judy Chicago, What is Paradise attests to Schapiro’s versatility as an artist.

Miriam Schapiro

Gladys Nilsson

American (b. 1940)

Course Line, 1975

Watercolor

12" x 15"

1981 Acquisition

Gladys Nilsson was a member of the 1960s Chicago Imagist group Hairy Who?

It was neither a movement nor a style but a loose collective of six artists who exhibited together at Hyde Park Art Center. Imagists like Nilsson enfold vibrant colors, bold lines, and psychedelic, urban imagery. Though their work was loosely unified in combining these elements, the Imagist artists of Hairy Who? took care to establish distinct individual styles. Nilsson distinguishes herself through the use of watercolors, rich tonal values and contorted two-dimensional human figures. In Course Line, Nilsson arranges several such tonally rich figures, informed by Indian miniatures and the ancient planar pictures common to the art of ancient Egypt and Greece. Nilsson said, “You can look at a piece of mine and think that it’s a benign exploration, but I like to think there’s an edge underneath it all in terms of certain commentaries on relationships. I’m an everyday person. … I’m not ruthless.” Despite the grand historical references and dramatic figuration Nilsson puts forth in Course Line, her attention to the “edge underneath” everyday relationships suggests that her distortive picture springs from humbler source material.

Jennifer Bartlett

American (1941-2022)

Untitled (Graceland Woodcut-State II), 1979 Woodcut

32 ¾" x 32 ¾" each

1981 Acquisition

Jennifer Bartlett is best known for prints and paintings in which everyday subjects — ranging from houses and gardens to oceans and skies — are visually reordered through scientific rule systems like the grid. This imposed structure allows viewers to focus on perception, process and the effects of shifting perspective. The three prints in the Reece Collection come from the artist’s larger Graceland woodcut series, a group of images that play with the common conception of a generic house — a recurring image in Bartlett’s work. But the title refers to no ordinary house. It references Elvis Presley’s Graceland Mansion in Memphis, a home that became the magnet for public attention in 1977 when the star suddenly died. Bartlett employs basic geometric shapes, such as squares, triangles and lines, for the five-color woodcuts, reducing our idea of the basic necessity for shelter into a two-dimensional form. In the first print, only the vertical lines are printed; in the second, only the horizontal lines are printed; and in the third, both the vertical and the horizontal lines complete the conceptualization of the form. Read from left to right, the works move fluidly from controlled, mathematical abstraction into a more painterly realism, a journey combining Bartlett’s artistic commitments to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Conceptualism. In a labor-intensive process, Bartlett cut the wood blocks herself. She wanted the prints to evidence their process of making and display their materiality. Of the medium, she said, “Woodcut is very direct. … It’s quite close to drawing.”

Howard Finster

American (1916-2001)

Heaven Is Worth It All, 1984 Enamel paint and mixed media on plexiglass

24" x 31"

1985 Acquisition

Howard Finster was a Baptist preacher whose evangelical faith and compulsive work habits made him one of the most prominent and prolific folk artists of the 20th century. He captured his visionary subjects in a vast range of media, from easel paintings and freestanding sculpture to giant cutouts, found-object assemblages and dioramas. He created paintings on rocks, gourds, bottles, briar roots, cars, bikes and trash cans, imaginatively transforming these humble everyday objects. Finster’s work helped to redefine traditional “folk art” to include a diverse range of faith-driven, stylistically raw work made by self-taught artists. Beloved in his lifetime for his quirky Americana, Finster designed an award-winning album cover for the Talking Heads and executed paintings for the Library of Congress. In Heaven Is Worth It All, Finster relates a complex and layered world — his own vision of the heavenly realm. Angels swoop through clouds of painted faces in this bizarre scene teeming with activity and set against a lush garden backdrop. On one tree in the center of the composition, painted lettering reads, “Heaven is worth it all.” Finster was a self-described “man of visions,” and his work conveyed his own vision of the kingdom of Heaven — a place that would make earthly suffering “worth it all.”

Sandy Skoglund

American (b. 1946)

Hangers, 1979

Cibachrome color print

30" x 40"

1985 Acquisition

A pioneer of installation photography, Sandy Skoglund makes use of bright colors, surrealist imagery and diverse media in psychedelic pop tableaux. An interdisciplinary artist at heart, Skoglund trained in filmmaking, intaglio printmaking and multimedia art at the University of Iowa. Ambitious photographs like Hangers require hours of meticulous set construction to reframe pop culture and commercial photography. A room of supersaturated color dominates the photograph. Dozens of blue-gray plastic clothes hangers are set into yellow walls and a pink floor. Two chairs painted yellow rest at odd angles. Citrus fruits peek through the ornate curvilinear cross-slats of the chairs. A rubber duck and a plant in a yellow pot crowd into the bottom-right corner of the picture, and Skoglund places a yellow bucket with yellow gloves and two stray plastic hangers at the bottom left. An androgynous figure wearing a yellow pajama suit cracks open a yellow door that is also covered in suspended hangers, but the figure’s expression and the space from which they enter remain elusive. Less than two decades after the heyday of Pop Art, Skoglund’s 1979 work reassesses the ambivalent signifiers of joy and desire so common in the age of mass consumption.

Odd Nerdrum

Norwegian (b. 1944)

The Baby, 1984

Etching

33" x 44"

1989 Acquisition

Hugh O’Donnell

British (b. 1950)

The San Giovanni Valdarno Series: Untitled III, 1985

Etching, soft ground, sugar lift

24" x 31 ¾"

1989 Acquisition

American

U-Dunk-Em, 1984

Oil stick on canvas

64" x 100"

1985 Acquisition

From a series of paintings centered on carnivals and fairs, Jane Dickson’s 8-footwide U-Dunk-Em depicts two women in the moments before a basketball shooting contest at a nighttime fair. The fluorescent-lit booth they inhabit is offset; to the left lies the dark landscape of the carnival with its spinning rides and twinkling lights. Dickson rose to prominence within the alternative art scene of New York City during the 1970s and ’80s. She is known for works like this one: rough-textured paintings that mirror real life while also occluding it with a dreamlike filter. The medium, oil stick on canvas, gives the image a matte finish and a surface appearance akin to colored stucco. Reminiscent of Pointillism and the chiaroscuro of Baroque painting, Dickson’s images of modern-day revelry weave these historical influences together into gritty depictions of American life. Reflecting her fascination with the power of artificial light and its contrasting blanket of night, U-Dunk-Em presents us with a view into the surreal and potentially transgressive environment of the carnival.

Jane Dickson

(b. 1952)

1985 Acquisition

In his large-scale works, Robert Longo interrogates popular culture’s reliance on images and explores the individual’s alienation in society. Eric is part of his best-known series, Men in the Cities. These explosive portraits consist of nearly life-size bodies: well-dressed men and women suspended in frenetic and ambiguous motion, caught between confinement and release. In the nearly 6-foot image, the man’s body is contorted as it either dances or seizes. As a young artist coming of age in the 1970s, Longo turned away from Minimalism and Conceptualism and toward representational images, looking to newspapers, advertisements, film and television for inspiration. Over the course of the following decade, the artist became a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists whose practices dissected the words and images of the mass media. His approach has since come to symbolize the changing landscape of 1980s New York City — with its rapid gentrification, gaudy excess and dominating stock market. It is in this way that works like Eric capture the conflicting ecstasy and horror of the 1980s capitalist yuppie culture. But the figure’s faceless body, lack of defining surroundings, and dramatic palette in stark black and white universalizes the figure’s stark outline. As the man’s right hand points downward in a Michelangelesque ode to Adam’s outstretched finger and his black tie flies up to form a graph-like silhouette, Longo’s anxious projections for the cultural impacts of American capitalism become clear.

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 1990-1999

Nancy Spero

American (1926-2009)

Ballade von der Judenhure

Marie Sanders, 1991

Lithograph

21" x 48"

1993 Acquisition

Nancy Spero was an artist and activist whose work probed political concerns across five decades of the 20th century. The lithograph on rice paper includes the full text of a poem by Bertolt Brecht in a monotype font at left, numbering the stanzas. Translated as “The Ballad of Marie Sanders, the Jew’s Whore,” the poem lends the artwork its title. Brecht’s poem recounts the sad story of Marie Sanders, a woman from Nuremberg who was shamed in public for loving a man accused of being Jewish. Set to music as a dramatic soprano solo by Hanns Eisler around 1935, the poem was first published in the Moscow-based literary magazine The Word in 1937. Spero’s intervention comes at the right of the print, where she renders the bound body of a nude woman. Ballade von der Judenhure Marie Sanders relies upon a transdisciplinary artistic genealogy, but Spero’s figure could be a composite of every woman in history shunned by the public for expressing desire.

Herbert Singleton

American (1945-2007)

Jesus at the Temple, 1992

Painted wood relief

19 ½" x 59 ¾"

1993 Acquisition

Born and raised in the Algiers district of New Orleans, Herbert Singleton painted wood carvings in bas-relief depicting the life of the city, Mardi Gras parades, funerals, as well as “struggle pieces” about racial injustice and religious stories like Jesus at the Temple. A carpenter by trade, Singleton’s folk art practice helped him process the traumas and struggles of his life. He salvaged wood for his pictorial reliefs from abandoned houses and other buildings in and around Algiers, carving without the aid of preliminary drawings or sketches. A self-taught artist, Singleton created sophisticated compositions that are filled with dynamic forms and subtle figure relationships. At nearly 5 feet wide, Jesus at the Temple evokes the shape and form of traditional Greco-Roman friezes. In a simplified color palette dominated by the repeated vertical columns of the white temple, Singleton portrays Christ (at far right) overturning the tables of the money changers and dove sellers who had invaded the holy space of the temple in Jerusalem.

Amy Jenkins

American (b. 1966)

Untitled XXX (from the Fairytale Series), 1990

C-print

24" x 20"

1997 Acquisition

1997 Acquisition

Painter Julie Heffernan braids the subjects of Northern Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo subjects with strands of contemporary surrealism and feminism. An overspilling bowl of fruit rests on a table before a black background in Self-Portrait as Explosion. Heffernan’s revamped still life nods to gendered and economic histories of painting. The still life tradition celebrated the splendors of Dutch colonial conquest and was available to women artists even when they were prohibited from undertaking formal training or viewing the nude body. Grapes glisten in the painting, still connected by bits of vine and leaves, and Heffernan uses the surfaces of other fruits to complicate her historical meditation. A vampiric figure stands by a bipedal poodle in a vignette on one apple; a miniature landscape, complete with the bending bodies of feminine bathers, overtakes another. A film noir interrogation scene emerges from a nectarine. An infant held by unidentifiable arms appears in grayscale on the side of a plum. Yet for all of the piece’s possible historical and symbolic implications, Heffernan identifies the painting as a self-portrait in her title, suggesting that her uncanny still life might speak to her psychic interior.

Ida Applebroog

American (b. 1929)

Promise I Won’t Die?, 1987

Lithograph, linocut, watercolor

36" x 47 ¼"

1993 Acquisition

A pioneering artist of the feminist movement, Ida Applebroog channels the aesthetics of the comic strip to explore themes of violence, power, women’s sexuality, gender politics and domestic space. Her perpetually ambiguous Promise I Won’t Die? deals with many of these issues. In the central panel — a watercolor-washed lithograph — a large tree bends languidly over a blank house. Laid atop its branches are various hand-drawn portraits evocative of black-andwhite photography. Their positioning may well be a metaphor for a family tree, suggesting connections between these individuals and the house below. Along the top register of the print, the outlines of two children are repeated like four actionless film stills. The hollowness of their repeated forms and their apparent lack of expression reinforce the impression of piercing isolation. In the right-hand panel, two ghostly figures appear as if in conflict — one dark and controlling, the other light and forcibly silenced. Though the overall meaning of these indefinite symbols remains ambiguous, Applebroog’s themes of violence, power and domestic politics nonetheless rise to the fore. The artist has suggested that we as viewers are meant to create meaning when confronted with her works, becoming, she says, “both audience and actors” in her “uncanny theater.”

Dennis Potter

American (b. 1950)

Untitled, 1991

Oil on paper

38" x 50" each

1993 Acquisition

Rita McBride

American (b. 1960)

Added Window Space, 1996

Bronze

6 ¼" x 4" x 2 ¼"

1997 Acquisition

In 1987, Rita McBride began to explore architectural and sculptural form in works ranging from small-scale objects to large public commissions. In Added Window Space, McBride explores the material transformation of this infrastructural element — a glassedin bay window — into a minute sculpture. With no small dose of irony, the title proclaims that this “addition” enlarges the window. But the small scale of the sculpture renders the “added space” minuscule; in reality, the piece consumes space with its display. McBride’s sense of irony is a prominent feature in her work, often as a source of sardonic humor. “My sense of humor,” McBride explains, “is infused in the sense of scale, the material, in the object itself.” The object’s gestural quality and the clumps and wrinkles in the bronze medium emphasize the corporality of this smallscale model as a made object, demonstrating the artist’s playful approach to the displacement of dimension in architectural models.

Lari Pittman

American (b. 1952)

This Landscape, beloved and despised, continues regardless, 1989

Lithograph/silkscreen

44" x 38"

1997 Acquisition

Lari Pittman’s artistic practice confronts and satirizes the chronic violence embedded within American history. His This Landscape, beloved and despised, continues regardless resembles many of Pittman’s paintings from the 1980s, images with titles like Colonial Power, The New Republic, Nationalism and Thanksgiving. They are reminiscent of the American Pop Art tradition in their use of graphics, but in their scale, ambition and all-over decoration, Pittman’s paintings evoke Abstract Expressionism. In This Landscape, the artist’s 19th-century alter ego appears as a silhouette in the top register, standing at his easel and centered within a dramatically parted curtain. He stands atop the sketchy outlines of bloodred mountains and the silhouetted forms of Victorian ancestors, buried in their coffins. Lime-green arrows streak through these figures, creating some zombified rendition of a Cold War flowchart. But rather than helping to make meaning, the diagram just adds to the chaos. Queering American history with his over-thetop embellishment, Pittman speaks poignantly about our nation’s dissolution and decay and the ever-present force of the history we might wish buried.

Glenn Ligon

American (b. 1960)

Untitled (Four Etchings), 1992

Suite of 4, softground etching, aquatint, spit bite, and sugarlift on paper

Each: 25 x 17.38 inches (63.5 x 44.15 cm)

Edition 31/45 and 10 APs

1993 Acquisition

Glenn Ligon investigates the complex issues of race and identity in his paintings, prints and installations. Ligon frequently appropriates texts and images from archival sources to reveal the ways in which the history of slavery and the civil rights movement inform our understanding of contemporary American life. This suite of four etchings is divided into two pairs. The two etchings printed in black on white paper, which are progressively difficult to read as the text descends, repeat quotes from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” The text — “I do not always feel colored,” and “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” — repeats and descends the page. Ligon has explained, “The prints play with the notion of becoming ‘colored’” and how “one is not born black; ‘blackness’ is a social construction.” The latter two prints in the suite repeat the first lines of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man in black on black paper, rendering them intentionally difficult to decipher. Here, Ligon builds upon Ellison’s use of the metaphor of invisibility to describe the position of Black people in America due to persistent structural racism. This illegibility makes visible the shifting and malleable qualities of words, which are not always easy to interpret. For Ligon, this effectively “makes the words cast shadows [that] bleed into one another [so that] their meanings seem less fixed.” The painterly smearing of the letters is, he said, “a metaphor for the interaction between blacks and whites in the construction of racial identity.”

American (b. 1944)

Bronze Bowl, 1997

Bronze 24" x 48" x 48"

1997 Acquisition

Meg Webster is a contemporary artist who describes herself as “a sculptor who makes minimal art with natural materials to be directly perceived by the body. Some works are to be entered. Some works are planted.” As its title suggests, Bronze Bowl is an open half-sphere of bronze intended for outdoor display. Webster’s environmentalist project calls on geometric forms that emphasize facets of the natural environment. The verdigris, or green patina on copper, that coats the surface of Bronze Bowl further integrates the object into forest surroundings. Scholarship on Webster lacks consensus on whether the artist’s environmentalist convictions extend to the materiality of her works; the forge fabrication of bronze objects is a heat- and pollution-intensive exercise, though some processes do exist to mitigate the ecological harm of heavy metal manufacturing. The sculpture typifies land art by expanding conceptions of the space of artistic encounter to include the natural world.

Meg Webster

American (b. 1938)

Untitled, 1995

Wood engraving

16" x 14 ¼"

1997 Acquisition

Vija Celmins is a Latvian American artist best known for photorealistic images of natural phenomena. Untitled marks a return to a common subject for Celmins: the ocean. This ocean image is based on one of a group of photographs of the Pacific Ocean, taken by the artist near her home in California in the late 1960s. The wood engraving captures the continuous movement and organic randomness of the ocean’s surface. Celmins cut the drawing itself into the wood surface so that her incisions translated in reverse to become the un-inked white lines of the print. She says of her approach, “My work has always been so involved in the ‘physical’ that cutting into the wood with this little knife was very satisfying! … When you come very close to the print, I think you feel the touch of the knife.” Seen up close, the work appears abstract; seen from a distance, her fine lines converge to a mass of waves. The sea is calm in Untitled, with even waves filling the entire visual field.

Vija Celmins

Carter Kustera

Canadian (b. 1962)

Based on a True Story #12: Mass Hypnosis: Rodney King/L.A. Riot, 1992-1993

Latex on printed canvas 72" x 84"

1993 Acquisition

Carter Kustera’s Based on a True Story #12: Mass Hypnosis: Rodney King/ L.A. Riot critiques the news media’s power to incite violence in the public. It appropriates photographs and film stills widely circulated in news coverage of the brutal beating of Rodney King, an African American man, by Los Angeles police on March 3, 1991. When the four white officers were acquitted by a jury in April 1992, riots broke out across the city, killing 63, injuring thousands and causing over $1 billion in damages. To create his work about the “mass hypnosis” perpetrated by the media, Kustera collaborated with technical experts to blow up the images (the finished work is an enormous 6 feet high and 7 feet wide), print them on latex and transfer them to canvas. He then painted his own images on top in bright red — a series of icons depicting various hands, arranged in a grid pattern. Many of these hands hold cameras; others wield a hammer, a match and a baseball bat; another holds an ink quill. As the work responds to an important event in the history of U.S. race relations, it critiques the media’s manipulation of the masses — a story told through the artist’s own manipulation of materials, form and content.

Bill Jacobson

American (b. 1955)

Song of Sentient Beings #1600, 1995

Silver print

24" x 20"

1997 Acquisition

Bill Jacobson is an American photographer. He began working with out-of-focus images in 1989 for the group exhibition Interim Figures at Grey Art Gallery in 1993. A gay man, Jacobson found unfocused portrait photography offered an apt visual metaphor for the community’s countless losses to HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Jacobson further refined his out-offocus approach in the series Song of Sentient Beings (1994-1995). The series comprises several hundred gelatin silver prints. Jacobson reduces the overall luminosity of the images and allows dark backgrounds to envelop the spectral figures of his subjects. Song of Sentient Beings #1600 features a bust-only image of one such phantasmatic figure in profile. The figure is bald and has a small, sharp nose, but their eye blurs into the darkness, eclipsing any identifying characteristics. Jacobson wrote of the project, “The blurred subjects underline the futility of capturing a true human likeness in both portraiture and memory.” An act of artistic love, Song of Sentient Beings reflects an active process of remembering in the face of loss, even as it admits the fallibility of memory.

Kiki Smith

American (b. 1954)

Untitled (Mouth), 1993

Bronze

4" x 5" x 5"

1997 Acquisition

Kiki Smith’s diverse feminist practice asserts an overt politics of the body. In contrast to the forceful yet sterile geometric sculptures of her father, the architect and Minimalist pioneer Tony Smith, Kiki Smith’s work is associated with abjection aesthetics: the bodily interior made visible. Untitled (Mouth) is a cast of the inside of the artist’s mouth — teeth, tongue and palate — in phosphorus bronze. With Untitled (Mouth), Smith takes the art world’s obsession with the artistas-celebrity to the extreme, opening wide for viewers to peer inside her head in a cheeky literalization of artistic taste. (All puns intended!) A feminist object exposing corporeal interiority, Untitled (Mouth) hearkens to Carolee Schneemann’s unraveling of Interior Scroll from her vagina in 1975 and sets the stage for fellow Reece Collection artist Mona Hatoum’s exhibition of her 1994 colonoscopy video, Corps Étranger (Foreign Body). Another edition of Untitled (Mouth) is among MoMA’s holdings. Smith’s ink print My Blue Lake (1995), which subverts beauty standards and conventions of figurative representation by other means, was donated to Wake Forest’s General Collection by Catherine Woodard (’80) and Nelson Blitz Jr. (P ’13) in 2000, three years after the 1997 student committee secured the bronze cast of Smith’s mouth for the Reece Collection.

Whitfield Lovell American (b. 1959)

Untitled (from the Empty Clothing Series), 1991

Screenprint

30" x 22 1/8"

1993 Acquisition

African American artist Whitfield Lovell’s Empty Clothing series is intended to be a visual elegy to the many nameless Black people whose identities have been lost to history. Working on large paper sheets layered with oil sticks and charcoal, he focuses on a single object rendered in vibrant monochrome. In Untitled, the white frock of a young girl hovers, suspended on a rich pink ground and overlaid with scrawled graffiti-like marks. As such, the empty form of the dress makes the lost girl’s absence present. His subjects are often sourced from vintage photographs from family albums as well as anonymous photos that related to the Black experience from the time of the Emancipation Proclamation in the late 1800s up to the civil rights era. Far from constricting, for Lovell, looking to this past is an act of liberation. In a 2006 interview he said, “It’s amazing how rich we are when we acknowledge history and we learn from it. It’s frightening to think of leaving everything behind and acting as if it never happened.”

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 2000-2009

Beatriz Milhazes

Brazilian (b. 1960)

Havai (Hawaii), 2003

Screenprint

52" x 46"

2005 Acquisition

Beatriz Milhazes makes colorful, kaleidoscopic collages, prints, paintings and installations that draw on both Latin American and European traditions. Her screenprint Havai (Hawaii) over- and underlays tiles of pale blue and ecru, which Milhazes punctuates with arabesque forms inspired by ceramics, lacework, carnival decoration, music, botanical motifs and colonial architecture. As Milhazes explains, “I am seeking geometrical structures, but with freedom of form and imagery taken from different worlds.” The artist cites opera, classical and Brazilian popular music as informants of the upbeat energy of her striations and circular forms. Colors, layers and symbols collide, reflecting the cultural and economic antagonisms that powered the colonization of both Milhazes’ native Brazil and the Hawaiian archipelago. Milhazes does not launch an explicit postcolonial critique in Havai, but the print acknowledges the simultaneous violence and beauty of cultural convergence. Operating in a “third space” between Indigenous and colonial cultures, Milhazes exposes solidarities between contemporary postcolonial cultures in her asymmetric yet harmonious composition.

Yun-Fei Ji Chinese (b. 1963)

Public Grain, 2004 Etching

36 ¼" x 28 ½"

2005 Acquisition

Yun-Fei Ji is a Chinese artist who has lived and worked in New York since 1990. He invokes motifs from Chinese folk art and lore in intricate and colorful etchings. In Public Grain, a red banner connects two oblong fields of speckled brown interrupted by the brightness of overlain rice hulls and a portrait of Chairman Mao. Woven baskets of rice and tiny laboring figures populate the fields. An ominous, quasi-botanical form in saturated black reaches up from the bottom border of the print. Ji centers his etching in the lower portion of the print, leaving much of the paper unmarked. Public Grain combines realistic renderings in an abstract orientation, making mythic the everyday processes of industrial agriculture and Communist food provision. Ji’s turn to traditional aesthetics marks an effort to sort truth from fiction in public discourse. The artist claims an interest “in recent history because what I was taught was suspect, and I wanted to find out what really happened. … There was a lot of [propaganda and] censorship.” It is fitting, then, that in pieces like Public Grain, Ji embraces a surreal anachronism to call attention to the historicity of the recent past and present.

Do-Ho Suh

South Korean (b. 1962)

Who Am We?, 1999

Iris print

35" x 47"

2001 Acquisition

Do-Ho Suh’s Who Am We? is a “wallpaper” centering an ambitious aggregation of found images. Suh collected thousands of tiny black-and-white portraits of male students from his school yearbooks, arranging them in a vast matrix on somerset paper. From too great a distance, the faces appear as little more than dots. From a few feet away, one can make out faces on the paper, but they are so small that each portrait could be the same photograph. Only up close do the distinguishing features of each student emerge with individuating clarity. Suh reflects on the Korean value of community in this work, choosing “we” instead of “I” for his interrogative title out of deference to the emphasis the Korean culture and language place on the individual’s relationship to the wider social world. Other editions of Who Am We? are among the holdings of the Walker Arts Center and MoMA.

Collier Schorr

American (b. 1963)

Catch/Caught (A.C. & S.S.), 2002 C-print

44 ¾" x 33 ½"

2005 Acquisition

In 2002, Collier Schorr visited Blairstown, New Jersey, to photograph its wrestling team for a project she would eventually call Wrestlers (2002). Schorr set out to make images of male adolescents in their vulnerability, struggle and pain in moments that combine the physical scripts of wrestling with the unscripted circumstances of the social event. The wrestling of Schorr’s Catch/Caught (A.C. & S.S.) retains the undeniable association of wrestling with masculine vigor. Schorr said, “For me, from the outside, masculinity has been depicted in very black-and-white terms. There never seems to be a wide range of emotional definitions of men. … [But] in wrestling, you really see so many different emotions, so many different reactions and interactions.” Catch/ Caught (A.C. & S.S.) challenges such narrow parameters on the public expression of masculinity, surfacing an intimate sensitivity that illuminates androgynous gender roles and homosocial contact in the sport.

Schorr heightens the impact of the delicate scene with chiaroscuro, the dramatization of light and shadow typified in the oeuvre of Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio.

Corin Hewitt

American (b. 1971)

A. Seed Stage No. 6, 2008

Digital pigment print

13 7/8" x 20 7/8"

B. Seed Stage No. 10, 2008

Digital pigment print 20 3/8" x 13 7/8"

C. Seed Stage No. 24, 2008

Digital pigment print

13 7/8" x 20 7/8"

D. Seed Stage No. 30, 2008

Digital pigment print 20 ¾" x 13 ¾"

E. Seed Stage No. 58, 2008

Digital pigment print

13 7/8" x 21"

2009 Acquisition

Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from Oct. 3, 2008, through Jan. 4, 2009, artist Corin Hewitt took up residence in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art to complete his epic installation and performance piece Seed Stage He cooked, sculpted, heated, cooled, cast, canned, ate and photographed the organic and inorganic materials — all while on display in a custom-built enclosure open to the public’s gaze. The art critic Holland Cotter described the setup as akin to “an insanely cluttered set for ‘The Martha Stewart Show’ doubling as a basement science lab and a hermetic art studio.” Fresh produce was brought up from a basement root cellar, and the space was retrofitted with an in-house composting system. The photographs now in the Reece Collection record Hewitt’s constant manipulation of the installation, as well as its natural process of decay. By tracking the mutations of the exhibition’s materials through these abstracted, cubist-inspired snapshots of an ongoing and process-based work of art, Hewitt meditates on the autonomy of the studio space, the cycles of creation and the genre of still life.

British Nigerian (b. 1962)

Climate Shit Drawing 1, 2008

Four-color lithographic print together with silkscreen glaze, collaged with fabrics and foils and die-cut Somerset radium white satin, 330gsm

19 ¾" x 13 ½"

Edition 119 of 200

2009 Acquisition

Yinka Shonibare CBE’s work centers on the concepts of colonialism and postcolonialism in the age of globalization. His exploration of the themes of African-European relations and national identities is heavily influenced by his own British Nigerian heritage. Shonibare was awarded both the MBE and later the CBE from the Order of the British Empire, and he adopted the suffix as his professional artistic identity as an act of postcolonial critique. The artist’s cutpaper collage Climate Shit addresses climate change with unapologetic frankness, colliding visually disparate elements connected by environmental concern: newspaper clippings about oil prices crash into collage cutouts of airplanes and native African flowers in the plane of the work. Shonibare cuts at least one of the flowers from Dutch wax fabric, and its vibrant yet disciplined patterns carry the violence of empire into his ecocritical work. From Shonibare’s viewpoint, symbols of the climate catastrophe hastened by fossil fuel dependence and other industrial forces are harbingers not only of universal human suffering but also of environmental racism. The climate crisis promises to affect individuals on different terms, intensified by the political implications of race, gender, ability status and geographic position. With Climate Shit, Shonibare demonstrates that no political discourse escapes the problematic nature of identity and questions whether the globalized world will ever be truly “postcolonial.”

Yinka Shonibare CBE

Robert Lazzarini

American (b. 1965)

rotary phone, 2000 Plastic, metal, rubber, paper 4" x 18 1/8" x 7"

2001 Acquisition

Robert Lazzarini’s sculpture rotary phone seems to compress the very fabric of the world, distorting our perceptions and challenging the limits of sculpture. While its aesthetics recall the Minimalism of the 1960s or the flattened skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), its subject matter references Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1936). Like Dalí’s telephone, Lazzarini’s surrealist object also pushes the boundaries of sculpture and art by offering us a glimpse into some alternate universe. To make rotary phone, Lazzarini began with a photograph of the old-school rotary phone the piece depicts. He scanned the photo into specialized computer software before artificially manipulating and stretching its digital image. The composite was then faithfully realized as a threedimensional sculpture using the same materials as the original object. Made with precision and care, rotary phone does not read as the representation of a phone but, rather, as the familiar object itself — contorted and pressed into an utterly flattened, uncanny object. It is in this way that the sculpture wavers between object and image, the real and the unreal.

Shahzia Sikander

Pakistani American (b. 1969)

Maligned Monsters #2 (Double Standing Figures), 2000

Aquatint, sugarlift, spit bite, drypoint and chine colle

19 ½" x 12 ½"

2001 Acquisition

Pakistani American visual artist Shahzia Sikander is well known for her delicate yet subversive works on paper, images that reformulate the traditional art of Indo-Persian miniature painting for our contemporary global world. By bringing these historic practices into the present day, Sikander examines colonial archives to address orientalist narratives in art history. The print Maligned Monsters #2 compares competing images of female beauty by juxtaposing two figures. One is depicted in traditional Indian garb (left), while the other is presented as a GrecoRoman nude (right). Though the figures appear to be fundamentally opposed, their forms are nevertheless intertwined — linked by looping calligraphic brushstrokes. As she stated in a 2013 interview, “I’m interested conceptually in the distance between the translation and the original.” The title references historian Partha Mitter’s important study Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977), a scholarly text that examines many of the same issues as Sikander’s rhapsodic images.

American (b. 1953)

Spanish Bath (Vertical), 2003

UV print on Dibond 90" x 72"

2005 Acquisition

Some of James Casebere’s earliest pictures appeared in The Pictures Generation, 19741984, the notable exhibition of Postmodern (staged and citational) photographs curated by Douglas Crimp for Artist’s Space in New York. Even then, his practice centered photographs of handmade model spaces, though Casebere admits his early models were less sophisticated than he might have liked. The artist earned a master’s degree in fine arts at California Institute of the Arts in 1979, studying under artists like John Baldessari and alongside Mike Kelley, among other notable contemporaries. He has worked to refine his model spaces into hyperrealistic but imagined scenes from throughout art and architectural history, taking highcontrast photographs of these constructions in his studio. This photograph of Casebere’s model of the titular Spanish bath luxuriates in surfaces: The rising water shimmers with immediacy, while light diffuses across the bath’s textured walls. Moorish arches cross an alcove in the background and the right edge of the image. The left side of the picture gives way to a solid wall bearing abstract geometric markings. The intense contrast of Spanish Bath (Vertical) casts the already dark “water” that fills the miniature bath in opaque blackness.

James Casebere

2009 Acquisition

Best known for his semi-abstract interior scenes and still lifes, Jonas Wood explores another side of his practice in Walton: his love of basketball and fascination with celebrity sports icons. In a two-part gouache painting on paper, Wood imitates the traditional format of athlete playing cards in his painted copy of basketball icon Bill Walton. Of this and similar works the artist has said, “For me, sports cards are ready-made portraits. They’re so accessible to my practice because they are flat, have bright colors and have lettering.” The blurred backgrounds in such cards are also “exciting” for Wood because, he claims, “I have to figure out a way to interpret them.” Paying homage to the Pop artists who inspire his practice, like Alex Katz and David Hockney, Wood gravitates toward the bold typographies and extreme graphics of ad-driven America. Transforming the cheap, mass-produced and handheld playing card into a large-scale and hand-painted work of fine art, Wood’s sports card paintings are both sincere and facetious. At the same time that he celebrates the heroes of celebrity sports culture, he seems also to comment on the absurdity of its near-religious position in our society.

Jonas Wood American (b. 1977) Walton, 2008 Gouache and colored pencil on paper 41" x 57"

Christian Marclay

American (b. 1955)

Memento (Hearing is Believing), 2008

Cyanotype 51" x 99"

2009 Acquisition

Visual artist Christian Marclay creates works — collages, videos and photographs — about music. Most interested in exploring the relationship between sight and sound, the artist has been unsurprisingly influenced by the chance-based scores of avant-garde artist and composer John Cage. In 2008 at the University of South Florida, Marclay produced a series of cyanotypes, a type of photogram made by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper before exposing the assemblage to UV light. Among this group is Memento (Hearing is Believing). Over 8 feet wide and 4 feet high, the enormous print depicts cassette tapes that have been broken open. Their magnetic reels spill out in chaotic tangles to cascade from the top of the composition in long, elegant strands. At the bottom of the frame, the tapes’ fragmented housings lay, fractured and spent. The title Memento thus evokes the vanishing technology of the cassette while conjuring the bittersweet sense of loss: Although the tape has created this beautiful artwork, it will never again play music.

Emily Jacir

Palestinian (b. 1970)

linz diary, 2003

C-print

8" x 8 ¾" each

2009 Acquisition

linz diary was a monthlong performance piece undertaken by the multidisciplinary artist Emily Jacir. This photograph is one in a series documenting the performance, for which Jacir visited a public square in the Austrian city of Linz each day, always sure to enter the view of a closed-circuit security camera. Following each visit to the square, Jacir sent a message to subscribers to her email newsletter along with the date and a short diary entry. This photograph represents Jacir’s return to the square on Oct. 11, 2003. Jacir informs the viewer of her positioning in case they cannot tell she is “curled up into a ball hiding.” People pass through the square, but the artist remains anonymous and unnoticed. Influenced by the ongoing territorial conflict bound up in her Palestinian heritage, linz diary and many of Jacir’s projects center lost narratives, stifled voices, and movement through time and space. In its reliance on state and corporate surveillance technologies for both image-making and communication with the work’s initial audience, linz diary probes the reach of mass surveillance and mobility in public spaces.

American (b. 1970)

Lazy Boy Crucifix, 1999

Upholstered chair, embroidery 42" x 73" x 67"

2001 Acquisition

Christopher Chiappa

Fred Tomaselli

American (b. 1956)

Escalante Warm Up, 1996

Pharmaceuticals, hemp leaves and acrylic in resin

24" x 24"

2001 Acquisition

Fred Tomaselli creates found-object collages that can be aptly described as psychedelic in more ways than one. Many of Tomaselli’s materials are psychoactives themselves: Medicinal herbs join with whole and crushed pill capsules and pigment to produce the overwhelming Escalante Warm Up. The result is a red-soaked abstraction, interrupted by an amoebic web of blackened shadow forms and a few orbs of white. Bridging scales of human perception, Escalante Warm Up could pass for a microbial photograph or a cosmological one. The title also refers to a geological formation, the Grand Staircase, located in Escalante, Utah. Tomaselli’s appropriation of pharmaceuticals and other remedies might attest to the artist’s mental health and experience with psychoactive material. He chiefly intends his artistic retaking of drugs as a provocation of viewers’ consciousness akin to the phenomena of color, abstraction and sublimity. “These chemical cocktails can no longer reach the brain through the bloodstream and must take a different route to altering perception,” the artist wrote. “In my work, they travel to the brain through the eyes.”

C-print

29 ½" x 40"

2001 Acquisition

Springing from the mass shooting at Columbine High School in April 1999, the series reflects on the relative significance and triviality of young people’s temporary social arrangements. For Bleeker and Wrisley, as for all her dual portraits, Moos directs her subjects to remain expressionless and photographs the pair before a blank, white background. The artist does not identify either subject as Bleeker or Wrisley. The woman at left has strawberry-blond hair and dons a black choker necklace and a pale blue sweater. The woman at right has blond hair and wears a red shirt and a circular necklace with a chain through its center. Moos spent a year observing a class at a private high school in Birmingham, Alabama, for the project, pairing students who were either best friends or worst enemies in 2000. Students did not learn the identity of their photographic counterpart until just before the photograph was taken. Moos leaves the relationship between each pair ambiguous and controls for expressions and background signification, requiring viewers to explain for themselves the relationships forged between different individuals in shared institutional contexts. It also invites Moos’ subjects to reflect on the ways that their early relationships can change over time.

Julie Moos American (b. 1965) Friends and Enemies Series (Bleeker and Wrisley), 2000

Luis Mallo

Cuban (b. 1962)

Laminas (No. 20), 1999

C-print mounted on plexiglass

24" x 20"

2001 Acquisition

Phil Frost

American (b. 1973)

Ralph Tiger Jones, 2001 Mixed media and collage on canvas and painted wooden chest

92" x 24" x 18"

2001 Acquisition

American (b. 1949)

Hat on Shoulder, 2002

Mixed media on linen

37" x 34"

2005 Acquisition

In Hat on Shoulder, Carroll Dunham explores the relationship between abstraction and figuration. Known as both a painter and printmaker, Dunham uses heavy layers and broad brush strokes to merge cartoonish corporeal forms with geometric ones. Dunham organizes two black blocks, diagonal lines, a window-like form and a pair of quasi-organic ovals (Pincers? Fingers? Testicles?). Dunham affirms that the work features the lapel, shoulder and hat of Mr. Nobody, an imaginary character who recurs in Dunham’s work. Mr. Nobody is often in search of the “orgone,” an essential life source and psychosexual impulse theorized by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (18971957). One critic wrote, “Dunham’s paintings cross the boundaries of taste, belching disorder in an experience of painting that is simultaneously accomplished and uncivilized.” The possibility of a primal sexuality lurks in Dunham’s ambiguous forms, but in Hat on Shoulder, neither the human nor the erotic emerge in earnest.

Carroll Dunham

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 2010-2019

Man Size, 2011

Digital C-print

40" x 50"

2017 Acquisition

Richard Mosse is an Irish-born photographer whose work offers a twofold examination of humanitarian crises and global visibility. Mosse produces provocative images from war-torn regions with obsolete photographic technologies. For his most acclaimed series, Infra (2010-2011), Mosse traveled to Eastern Congo with the now-discontinued Kodak Aerochrome film. Originally developed as military surveillance technology, this film renders chlorophyll in bright pinks and reds and was used in the Vietnam War to identify guerilla fighters camouflaged in the dense jungle. Man Size depicts two Congolese child soldiers in a lush rainforest made surreal by emulsion. The dominant, synthetic hue scrambles prevailing Western conceptions of pink as innocuous or feminine. While Mosse uses color to striking effect in Man Size, the work blurs the line between documentary and fine art photography and poses thorny questions about the right to represent. What ethics validate a white artist’s choice to represent Black bodies in direct relationship with guns? In his utilization of the skewed process by which Aerochrome registers color, Mosse’s work calls attention to the parallel process by which war robs children of their childhood. Replete with political paradox and startling pinkness, Man Size demonstrates the fallibility of any singular political viewpoint.

Richard Mosse Irish (b. 1980)

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Japanese (b. 1948)

Lightning Fields 143, 2009

Gelatin silver print mounted to board 23 5/8" x 18 7/8"

2013 Acquisition

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields series depicts electricity: an essential and ubiquitous yet invisible part of our modern-day lives. Across fields of velvet black, bold cracks and rivulets of white lightning explode in intimate constellations, capturing the precise image of energy spreading across a photographic negative. To create each picture, Sugimoto uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto unexposed film. The result is a unique, instantaneous image capturing a live electrical current. By exposing a photosensitive material (the negative) to light (raw electricity from the generator) to create a chemically fixed image (the work), the artist’s process itself embodies the medium of photography at its most elemental. The images Sugimoto creates, like Lightning Fields 143, offer near-mystical views into the primordial and metaphysical force that powers our world.

Thomas Struth

German (b. 1954)

Grazing-Incidence-Spectrometer

Max Planck IPP, Garching, Germany, 2010, 2010

Digital print

44 5/8" x 56"

2013 Acquisition

One of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Thomas Struth’s large-scale, hyper-realist works depict diverse subjects: places of worship, jungles, intimate family moments, museum visitors looking at art, and colossal research laboratories. In Grazing-Incidence-Spectrometer, Struth gives us a glimpse into the world behind technological innovation, an unexplored land to which we do not normally have access. The clarity of his photographic print electrifies our experience of pulling back the proverbial curtain on this secret lab. In the image, we are made to perceive the complexity, importance and force of the technological process. At the same time, however, we can also sense the power and the politics of these operations — and the business they conceal. By creating large works that insightfully query the nature of society and of humanity, Struth heightens the importance of the photographic medium, placing it in line with the genre of history painting for our current moment.

Mona Hatoum

British Palestinian (b. 1952)

Over my dead body, 2005

Heliogravure

27" x 39 ¼"

2017 Acquisition

Mona Hatoum is a British Palestinian artist working across diverse media, including video, performance, sculpture, installation, billboard screenprinting, drawing and papermaking. Over my dead body was originally shown in 1988 at billboard scale and depicts the artist, photographed in profile. Over my dead body borrows from the language of advertising by using the popular expression “over my dead body,” which echoes the saying “No Passerán!” It is a humorous yet complex and contradictory image. It plays with scale to reverse the power relationships by reducing the symbol of masculinity to a small creature, like a fly, that one can flick off. Also, the toy soldier that was used to symbolize conventional warfare conjures up in one’s mind the expression “toys for the boys,” but the “boy” here has been reduced to a “toy.” Hatoum favors such simple but tongue-in-cheek visual idioms, which she deploys to comment on power imbalances in global culture. Born to Palestinian exiles in Beirut and later stranded in London, where Hatoum lives and works today, the artist is also a byproduct of the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict. Her countenance and the boldface title assert a frank defiance of state-sponsored cultural displacement throughout the world, aligning this political position with a feminist tradition.

Faig Ahmed

Azerbaijani (b. 1982)

DNA, 2016

Hand-woven wool

51 ¼" x 94 ½"

2017 Acquisition

Faig Ahmed grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan, and uses woven carpets to probe the interface between progress and tradition. One side of DNA adopts the conventional appearance of a curvilinear Azerbaijani carpet. Near the middle of the carpet, the traditional image ruptures into a DNA sequence incorporating the same colors. Ahmed partners with local weavers in the region who use historic looms and conventional carpet-making practices to produce his unconventional designs. The artist claims that “mutation is something against structure. … Mutation is something that spoils these rules.” DNA offers evidence that, like the human genome, the historical practice of weaving is susceptible to mutation. The work is no less an Azerbaijani carpet because it takes on an irregular shape or because the image originated as pixels in Ahmed’s design software. Each overlap of the warp and weft of DNA is a unit of code, too minute to be seen alone but critical to the makeup of a complex entity, be it a body, a material or a culture.

American

Courtyard, Former Cass Tech HS, Detroit, 2008

Digital print

33" x 39 ½"

2013 Acquisition

Photographer and filmmaker Andrew Moore is best known for vividly colored, large-scale photographs of architectural structures and landscapes across the world, from Cuba and Russia to Detroit and the Great Plains of the American West. Detailing the structural remnants of societies in transition, his compositions experiment with the traditional narrative approaches of documentary photography. Of his practice Moore has stated, “I have a perpetual fascination with certain kinds of decayed spaces … where the evidence of people struggling to keep their dignity lingers, places that have been abandoned but retain the ghosts of what they were.” His Detroit series spotlights the city’s derelict urban structures. Largely devoid of people, these photographs have an eerie, post-apocalyptic feel. Akin to the 19th-century Romanticism found in images of crumbling Gothic churches, Courtyard, Former Cass Tech HS, Detroit witnesses the impact of severe economic depression on one abandoned high school. Looking across the open-air courtyard, a grid of gaping windows offers clear views into classrooms littered with toppled desks, scattered papers and chalk-strewn blackboards. These abandoned spaces echo hollowly with the classes once taught here.

Andrew Moore

(b. 1957)

Shirin Neshat

Iranian American (b. 1957)

Marjan (Masses) from The Book of Kings series, 2012

Silver gelatin print 40" x 30"

2017 Acquisition

Shirin Neshat’s The Book of Kings series manifests the tenacity of the contemporary Iranian diaspora. The series takes its name from the Persian epic Shahnameh and contains three parts: Masses, Patriots and Villains. Neshat scrambled excerpts from Shahnameh and works by living Iranian poets, hand-inscribing a nonsensical poetics of old-andnew Farsi onto the black-and-white portraits of Iranian youth, like Marjan, living in New York in the 2010s. The weight of the calligraphic ink follows natural variations in the subject’s skin tone. Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran, but was unable to return to her home country after finishing school in the United States because of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The artist marks her subject in indiscernible combinations of their shared ancestral culture. Neshat’s work acknowledges the incomprehensibility of Iranian cultural knowledge — past and present — to a global audience. But Neshat also leaves Marjan’s eyes and mouth uncovered by the anachronistic Farsi, empowering Marjan’s voice and vigorous gaze to tell her own story.

Sun Xun

Chinese (b. 1980)

The Time Vivarium - 81, 2014

Acrylic and ink on paper

Paper: 13 x 19 inches (33 x 48.3 cm)

Signed and dated by the artist, recto

2017 Acquisition

Sun Xun’s woodblock animation video

The Time Vivarium positions cultural memory as the property of the powerful, leveraging a Surrealist marriage of animal and mechanical motifs with anachronistic references to historic Chinese art. The founder of Pi Animation, Xun uses paint, ink, woodcuts and charcoal to create every image in his animations. Xu was born during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Fuxin, a northeastern province dominated by mining and agricultural industries. “Your hometown is like a diary. … It’s the starting point of your values,” he wrote. The Time Vivarium (duration: 8:38) brings together jolting images of animals and communications equipment with a cacophonous sound design to challenge state bureaucracy and nationalist propaganda. The Time Vivarium - 81 is one of the film’s hundreds of frames. A goose flies east, its head trapped in a busy cloud. Are Chinese culture and the global economy on course for greatness or simply flying blind?

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITIONS 2020-2022

Salman Toor Pakistani (b. 1983)

The Meeting, 2020 Oil on panel 12" diameter

2021 Acquisition

Salman Toor’s figurative paintings depict intimate moments in the lives of young, queer, Brown men on a cosmopolitan stage. The artist — who was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and now lives and works in New York City — incorporates Western art historical tropes into his practice, remaking familiar iconography by staging similar scenes from his own experience. In The Meeting, Toor depicts the erotically charged meeting of two men at a nighttime party at a rooftop bar. The distinctively round shape of the panel references the Renaissance tondo (Italian for “round,” meaning a circular work). Tondos traditionally depicted the Madonna with Christ. The loose brushstrokes, vivid coloration and bar scene evoke the practices of Impressionist painters. But Toor takes these canonical references and makes them his own. The green palette overshadowing the figures creates a hazy, dream-like effect, drawing the viewer into Toor’s cartoonish fantasy world where all is lush and there is always the twinkle of magic.

Jay Lynn Gomez

American (b. 1986)

David Feldman, photographer

Las Meninas, North Fairing Road, Bel Air, 2013, 2018

Archival pigment print

30" x 30"

2021 Acquisition

Las Meninas, North Fairing Road, Bel Air, 2013 is a photograph of the artist Jay Lynn Gomez’s cardboard installation of the same title taken by David Feldman. Gomez is a transgender Mexican American artist from California. Her experiences as a nanny inform the installation, which centers a cutout of the central infanta (princess) from Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Two cardboard cutouts of anonymous Latina child care workers prop up the delicate princess in front of a Bel Air mansion. The placement of the cardboard figures in open air lends the work an air of ephemerality that mirrors the timeless treatment of workers as prepackaged and disposable. The Southern California debutante is not so different from the princesses of the 17th century: hypervisible but materially and personally supported by an economic web of invisible labor. Gomez restages Velázquez’s titular meninas (ladies in waiting) as nannies. While the laboring Bel Air cutouts do not don hoop skirts, Gomez grants these contemporary domestic workers the visibility and artistic status of Spanish Golden Age painting. Feldman’s photograph of Gomez’s installation redirects viewers’ attention from the shining edifice of capitalism to real people, whose labor to make that edifice shine so often goes uncredited.

Martine Gutierrez

American (b. 1989)

Queer Rage, Don’t Touch the Art, p68 from Indigenous Woman, 2018

C-print mounted on sintra

42" x 28"

2021 Acquisition

In Queer Rage, Don’t Touch the Art, Martine Gutierrez simultaneously positions her brown, trans body at the center of two gate-kept and high-stakes representational environments: the art museum and the fashion magazine. The photograph appears in Gutierrez’s Indigenous Woman, a 124-page mock fashion publication the artist produced for the Venice Biennale in 2018. She stands before maroon walls with dark-wood paneling. Paintings of nymphs, reclining nudes and cattle decorate the walls in ornate frames. Gutierrez dons a pencil dress dyed in highlighter yellow and pastel greens, reds, pinks and blues. Her face is marked in the same pastel colors, and light blue coats her bangled arms from just below the shoulder to her fingertips. She wears green shoes and holds a doll representing her Mayan heritage in her left hand. She bends her right arm to lean against an unnamed marble portrait bust of an older man, perhaps a Roman statesman. A smooth, uninterrupted whiteness covers the surface of the bust, save for a slash of hot pink over the man’s mouth; the pink echoes Gutierrez’s magenta lipstick, neon pink bob hairdo and the flowers billowing from a nondescript glass vase beside her. A gilt wood table flanks the image at the right side and a well-upholstered chair frames the image on the left. Asserting claims on the visual and spatial economies that historically derided Indigenous and gender nonconforming bodies, Gutierrez wields a wry institutional critique in Indigenous Woman, shot through with camp humor and undeniable glamor alike.

Willie Cole

American (b. 1955)

Between Body and Soul, 2018

Lithograph and inkjet print

41 ½" x 69 ¾"

2021 Acquisition

Since the 1990s, African American artist Willie Cole has been transforming clothes irons, ironing boards, hairdryers and high-heeled shoes into sculptures, installations and works on paper that celebrate African art and confront the painful history of slavery in America. In his triptych Between Body and Soul, the artist juxtaposes a cross-section of a modern clothes iron (at left) with its imagistic corollary, made up of disparate artifacts from the African and American continents (at right). The rightmost panel is a numbered key identifying the disparate parts of Cole’s reimagining. No. 20, for example, reads “Cat of Nine Tails Whip, United States.” In a haunting parallel, the mirror to this shape in the iron diagram at left is the electric cord and plug — the very source of the machine’s energy. Cole has explained, “I use the iron as a catalyst for the discussion about the journey from Africa to the Americas.” Positioned over a bright blue background of rippling waves, his diagrammatic image recalls the historical Description of a Slave Ship print (1789) at the same time that its subject matter — a steam iron — points forward to the domestic labor performed by millions of Black people in the 20th century, itself a new kind of American slavery.

Suchitra Mattai

Indo-Caribbean (b. 1973)

In One Fell Swoop, 2020 Fabric, hair, tassels, zippers, needlepoint and sequins

28" x 26"

2021 Acquisition

Colorful fabrics, drapery tassels, zippers, sequins, a vintage needlepoint and a hunk of her own hair are some of the objects Suchitra Mattai assembled for In One Fell Swoop, a journeying and enigmatic work about the dispossession of identity perpetrated by colonialism. Born in Guyana, the artist of Indo-Caribbean descent dedicates her mixed-media practice to examining the violent colonial history her family has endured. “I tell my family’s stories because these are the stories of people you wouldn’t hear otherwise,” she said. In line with the thematic commitments of her larger practice, In One Fell Swoop focuses on the representation of women by employing weaving, stitching and embroidery to bring these long-derided techniques into the realm of fine art. The composition centers on a found needlepoint that copies Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola (c. 1513-1514). Raphael’s image — representative of Western art more broadly — is obscured by the repeating vertical lines of gray zippers typically used in the fabrication of clothing and aqua-colored sequins reminiscent of Guyanese Carnival celebrations. Covering over the Madonna while allowing Christ to see out, Mattai’s work becomes a meditation on cultural alienation and the dissociative feeling, experienced by many immigrants and women, of being labeled “other” by the society they inhabit.

Zanele Muholi

South African (b. 1972)

Thandiwe I, Roanoke, Virginia, 2018

Gelatin silver print

35 ½" x 23 5/8"

2021 Acquisition

The work of South African photographer Zanele Muholi often explores the braid of race, gender and sexuality. Before 2012, Muholi prioritized photographing other South Africans whose lesbian, queer, trans and intersex identities reflected Muholi’s own. For Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) (2012-), Muholi turns the lens upon themself, in a series of 365 self-portraits in which the artist embodies alter egos bearing Zulu names. For one of these self-portraits, Thandiwe I, Roanoke, Virginia, Muholi dons a headwrap of varying denominations of U.S. dollars — and nothing else. Their sparkling eyes train on the viewer. The Virginia sun reflects on their skin. They stand before a few hazy trees, one of which appears almost to emerge from the top of Muholi’s cash-adorned head. Activating global histories of enslavement and plantation economics, Muholi refracts the white association of Black flesh with economic value. Asked about their turn to self-portraiture for Somnyama Ngonyama, Muholi said, “I wanted to use my face so that people will always remember just how important our Black faces are when confronted by them … for this Black face to be recognized as belonging to a sensible, thinking being in their own right.” Muholi uses monetary notes and their invented persona to suspend the white gaze at the surface of their body, preempting the stereotypes and slippages that so often land on Black and LGBTQ+ bodies. As Thandiwe I, one of 365 titular dark lionesses in the Somnyama Ngonyama series, Muholi embodies Black queerness with self-possession.

Betty Tompkins

American (b. 1945)

Women Words (Ingres #3), 2018 Acrylic paint and book page 11 ¼" x 8 ¾"

2021 Acquisition

Betty Tompkins initiated her Women Words series in 2010 to establish connections between art history and the rhetorical derogation of women. Tompkins first invited a global network of women to submit writings detailing the words and phrases most often associated with womanhood. She then produced over 3,500 paintings that incorporate the aggregated language into appropriations of canonical male artists’ depictions of women. The text written on Women Words (Ingres #3) was submitted by one of Tompkins’ close friends, reflecting her experience of immersion in a culture of abusive misogyny. Tompkins makes the text almost illegible, perhaps to fit the needs of her aesthetic strategy but perhaps also to deny the abusive language some of its power. The choice to cite Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Madame Moitessier (18441856) deepens Tompkins’ critical edge: Ingres made scores of paintings imagining the bodies of women as loci of abstraction and exoticist fantasy. Tompkins suspends the contemporary rhetoric of gendered violence on the surface of Moitessier’s body, securing a right to embodied autonomy for the contemplative yet exposed woman reflected in the mirror.

Chilean American (b. 1958)

May 25, 2020, 2020

Oil paint and cold wax on canvas

40" x 57"

2021 Acquisition

May 25, 2020, was the day George Floyd was murdered by police on the streets of Minneapolis. The event catalyzed a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and brought discussions of race, equity, inclusion and the systemic injustices ingrained in American society into mainstream discourse.

Chilean American artist Jorge Tacla’s blurred grayscale painting recalls his own memories of that day, as well as the protests and marches that swept across the United States throughout the summer of 2020. In line with the subject matter of his larger practice, Tacla’s experience of witnessing political and social unrest led him to create a work reflecting the collective memory of political uprising. Of his role as a documenter of sociocultural turbulence, Tacla said, “Destruction does not create memory; it should remain in memory.” Depicting a close-up view of anonymous faces in a crowd of protesters, fists raised, the image oscillates between abstraction and representation. The medium — oil and cold wax on canvas — lends the painting a tactile presence. Dreamlike, seen as if through a screen marred by static, the image exposes the ways in which the physical and psychological traumas of history continuously shape contemporary society.

Jorge Tacla

Rashaun Rucker

American (b. 1978)

Tapestry of My Soul, 2021

Linocut 36" x 72"

2021 Acquisition

Artist Rashaun Rucker, a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, explores the power of storytelling in his work Tapestry of My Soul. Part of his series Up From the Red Clay, the black-and-white print imitates the aesthetics and forms of narrative quilts, a type of folk art with deep roots in the American South. Recalling works from Harriet Powers to the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Rucker develops, across 18 linked squares, a legible symbology drawn from his own childhood. In the middle register — from left to right — are portraits of the artist’s grandfather, grandmother and father. These straight-on headshots are interspersed with icons of religion and nature and abstract squares referencing different quilting patterns. Together, these symbols form a tapestry recalling the softest parts of Rucker’s early life: a reflection of the warmth and comfort found beneath the quilt he remembers sleeping under at his great-grandparents’ home. Of his practice Rucker has said, “My art is very narrative. I’m a storyteller.” He attributes this perspective to his 10-year career as a photographer with the Detroit Free Press. “Whether it’s drawing, printmaking or photography, it’s all about the stories that I’m telling.” Rucker’s sweet and soft depiction of Black masculinity deliberately combats negative stereotypes too often featured in contemporary news media — of violence, death and the unjust treatment of Black men. The stories of Rucker’s soul told in this assemblage of selfhood are a powerful articulation of the triumphs that come with writing one’s own history.

1960 s 1980 s 2000 s 2020 s

1970 s 1990 s 2010 s

ACQUISITION TRIPS

1963-1964

Advisors:

J. Allen Easley

Robert Myers

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Edwin G. Wilson (’43)

Students:

David Forsyth (’71)

Theodore Meredith (’64)

Artists:

A. Richard Anuszkiewicz

B. Robert Broderson

C. Charles Cajori

D. Ruth Clarke

E. J.W. Edwards

F. John Hartell

G. Stanley Hayter

H. Joseph Heil

I. Elaine de Kooning

J. Birgit “Gitte” Krøncke

K. William R. Lidh

L. George McNeil

M. Pablo Picasso

N. Pablo Picasso

O. Milton Resnick

P. Anne Kesler Shields

Q. Francis Speight

R. John Waddill

1965-1966

Advisors:

Robert Myers

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Edwin G. Wilson (’43)

Emily H. Wilson

Students:

Janet Davidson-Hues (’66)

Mark Robinson (’67)

Gail Scott (’66)

Artists:

A. Milton Avery

B. Leonard Baskin

C. Isabel Bishop

D. Grace Cranford Freund

E. Claude Howell

F. Paul Jenkins

G. Darell Koons

H. Robert Vickrey

“The art-buying trip was one of [the highlights], if not the highlight, of my time at Wake Forest. Beyond the experience itself, as someone working in the art world now, my participation laid the foundations for my career, and for that I’m very grateful to have been part of such an incredible and unique program.”

James Morrill (’05)

1969

Advisors:

Sterling Boyd

Barbara Babcock Milhouse

Robert Myers

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Edwin G. Wilson (’43)

Students:

Beth Coleman (’71)

Leslie Hall Hallenbeck (’72)

Harvey Owen (’71)

J. D. Wilson (’69)

Artists:

A. Harold Altman

B. Garo Antreasian

C. Margit Beck

D. Robert Burkert

E. Paul Cadmus

F. Hans Erni

G. Antonio Frasconi

H. Sidney Goodman

I. Adolph Gottlieb

J. Robert Gwathmey

K. Nathan Cabot Hale

L. Jasper Johns

M. Joe Lasker

N. Roy Lichtenstein

O. Reginald Marsh

P. Robert Motherwell

Q. Ben Shahn

R. Paul Wunderlich

Advisors:

Penny Griffin

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Anne Kesler Shields

Students:

Lynn Koenecke Bradley (’74)

Elaine Jessee Guth (’74)

Gail Love Jones (’73)

Denise Lillian Perrault (’74)

Artists:

A. Helen Frankenthaler

B. A.B. Jackson

C. Alex Katz

D. Louise Nevelson

E. Jules Olitski

F. Ray Prohaska

“Little did I know when I was 20 years old and going on an art-buying trip to NYC that I was actually getting a glimpse into my future: the business of making, exhibiting and selling art, something that now seems second nature to me.

I had no idea how pivotal that singular experience would be for me. My degree was a B.A. in English. Wake Forest did not offer studio art classes at that time, necessitating my going cross-town to Salem College to take painting classes.

I was, however, taking Dr. Wilson’s literature classes, and it was there that I was inspired and my love of language was born and nurtured, eventually finding its way into my work, where it still resides.”

Janet Davidson-Hues (’66)

1977

Advisors:

Robert H. Knott

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Anne Kesler Shields

Students:

Powell Bland (’78)

Matt Bullard (’78)

Greg Jones (’77)

Royce Weatherly (’80)

Artists:

A. Jack Beal

B. Ronald Davis

C. Jim Dine

D. Red Grooms

E. Ellsworth Kelly

F. Ron Kleemann

G. Alfred Leslie

H. Robert Mangold

I. Philip Pearlstein

J. Fairfield Porter

K. Bob Timberlake

L. Robert Rauschenberg

M. William T. Wiley

1981

Advisors:

Marvin Coats

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Anne Kesler Shields

Students:

Anne Easley Barnes (’81)

Patrick Cloninger (’83)

Charlene Newsom (’82)

Doug Varley (’81)

Artists:

A. Jennifer Bartlett

B. Allan Erdmann

C. Gladys Nilsson

D. Joseph Raffael

E. Miriam Schapiro

F. James Surls

1985

Advisors:

Victor Faccinto

Mary Gerardy

Bob Knott

Mark H. Reece (’49)

Anne Kesler Shields

Students:

Kim Adkins Foster (’85)

Nikkie (Michael) Friedman (’85)

Cynthia Jetter Harper (’86)

Linda Anne Humnick (’88)

Steven Zielske (’85)

Artists:

A. Jane Dickson

B. Howard Finster

C. Keith Haring

D. Robert Longo

E. Ed Paschke

F. Jody Pinto

G. Sandy Skoglund

1989

Advisors:

James Buckley

David Faber

Students:

Terry Shuping Angelotti (’90)

Jennifer Brunt Curtis (’90)

Susan “Renee” Torchia (’89)

Kacey Venglik (’89)

Hubert Womack (’90)

Artists:

A. Robert Colescott

B. Richard Diebenkorn

C. John Monti

D. Odd Nerdrum

E. Hugh O’Donnell

1993

Advisors:

Mary Gerardy

Bob Knott

Ken Zick

Students:

Shell Knox Berry (’93)

Beth Oelrich Clark (’94)

William Hawk (’93)

Phoebe Hillman (’93)

Charles Walker (’93)

Artists:

A. Ida Applebroog

B. Carter Kustera

C. Glenn Ligon

D. Whitfield Lovell

E. Dennis Potter

F. Herbert Singleton

G. Nancy Spero

1997

Advisors:

James Buckley

Page Laughlin

Students:

Christine Calareso Bleecker (’99)

Jennifer Bumgarner (’99)

Mary Leigh Cherry (’97)

Elizabeth Gray (’98)

Crystal Thomas (’97)

Curtis Harmon Thompson (’99)

Artists:

A. Vija Celmins

B. Julie Heffernan

C. Bill Jacobson

D. Amy Jenkins

E. Rita McBride

F. Lari Pittman

G. Kiki Smith

H. Meg Webster

2001

Advisors:

Gale W. Newport

John R. Pickel

Students:

Kerry Dillon (’01)

Urmi Engineer (’02)

Andrew Helicher (’01)

David James (’01)

Meredith Mulhearn (’01)

Kendall Scully Rabun (’01)

Artists:

A. Christopher Chiappa

B. Phil Frost

C. Robert Lazzarini

D. Luis Mallo

E. Julie Moos

F. Shahzia Sikander

G. Do-Ho Suh

H. Fred Tomaselli

2005

Advisors:

Heather M. Childress

Mary T. Gerardy

Robert H. Knott

Students:

Geoffrey Thomas Barton (’05)

Rebecca Boswell (’05)

Melissa Cortina (’05)

Keonna Hendrick (’05)

Kathryn Greenberg Mayshak (’05)

James Morrill (’05)

Artists:

A. James Casebere

B. Carroll Dunham

C. Yun-Fei Ji

D. Beatriz Milhazes

E. Collier Schorr

2009

Advisors:

Kathryn C. Arnett

John J. Curley

Leigh Ann Hallberg

Students:

Claire Altizer (’09)

Abby Bauman (’09)

Emily Ann Mihalik (’10)

James Lee Sperzel (’10)

Antonina Whaples (’10)

Ashley H. Williams (’09)

Lucy Zimmerman (’09)

Artists:

A. Corin Hewitt

B. Emily Jacir

C. Christian Marclay

D. Yinka Shonibare CBE

E. Jonas Wood

“I learned how to skillfully balance not only how a piece spoke to me individually, but how it spoke to the group, how it impacted the current culture and times, and how Wake Forest would benefit from having it in the collection. Ultimately, the trip was a life-changing experience that continues to inform how I think about art and purchase it for my own personal collection.”

Christine Calareso Bleecker (’99)

Advisors:

Kathryn C. Arnett

John J. Curley

Joel Tauber

Students:

Caroline Culp (’13)

Katherine Winokur Hooper (’14)

Emma Hunsinger (’13)

Laurel McLaughlin (’13)

Mattos Paschal (’14)

Jonathon Rowe (’14)

Kelsey Zalimeni (’14)

Artists:

A. Andrew Moore

B. Thomas Struth

C. Hiroshi Sugimoto

“The art-buying trip was a formative, immersive and educational experience that allowed me to understand the real-life art world and market while I was still an undergraduate student. I left having powerful connections to artists and galleries that informed my career. I absolutely credit this experience as the reason I got my first job in the art world at Sotheby’s.”

Jackie Dishner (’21)

2017

Advisors:

Leigh Ann Hallberg

John J. Curley

Students:

Kayla Amador (’19)

Jay Buchanan (’17)

William Coleburn (’18)

Brooke Einbender (’17)

Devon Gilbert (’17)

Xinjie “Addison” Wang (’19)

Artists:

A. Faig Ahmed

B. Mona Hatoum

C. Richard Mosse

D. Shirin Neshat

E. Sun Xun

2021

Advisors:

John J. Curley

Jennifer Finkel

David Finn

Students:

Maddy Barnick (’22)

Anna Burkhardt (’22)

Lucy Chapman (’23)

Sarah Comegno (’21)

Emma Cooney (’23)

Jacqueline Dishner (’21)

Amy Dyckman (’21)

Emma Hein (’21)

Lynn Huffard (’21)

Mikey Mattone (’21)

Lucy Owen (’23)

Leah Rodman (’22)

Chrisann Timbie (’22)

Artists:

A. Willie Cole

B. Jay Lynn Gomez and David Feldman

C. Martine Gutierrez

D. Suchitra Mattai

E. Zanele Muholi

F. Rashaun Rucker

G. Jorge Tacla

H. Betty Tompkins

I. Salman Toor

Copyrights

Faig Ahmed - © Faig Ahmed Studio. Courtesy the artist and Sapar

Contemporary

Harold Altman - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Garo Antreasian - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Richard Anuszkiewicz - © 2022 Richard Anuszkiewicz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Ida Applebroog - © Ida Applebroog

Milton Avery - © 2022 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jennifer Bartlett - © Jennifer Bartlett. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and The Jennifer Bartlett 2013 Trust.

Leonard Baskin - © The Estate of Leonard Baskin

Jack Beal - © Estate of Jack Beal. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York

Margit Beck - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Isabel Bishop - © Estate of Isabel Bishop, Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, NYC

Robert Broderson - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Robert Burkert - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Charles Cajori - © Estate of Charles Cajori

James Casebere - © James Casebere, Courtesy: the artist and Sean Kelly.

Vija Celmins - © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Christopher Chiappa - Reproduced with permission of the artist

Ruth Clarke - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Willie Cole - © Courtesy of the Artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago

Robert Colescott - © 2022 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ron Davis - © 1975 Ronald Davis

Elaine de Kooning - © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Jane Dickson - Reproduced with permission of the artist. © Jane Dickson Studio Ltd.

Richard Diebenkorn - © The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn

Jim Dine - © 2022 Jim Dine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Carroll Dunham - © Carroll Dunham

J.W. Edwards - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Allan Erdmann - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Hans Erni - © Hans Erni-Foundation, Lucerne

Howard Finster - © 2022 Howard Finster / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Helen Frankenthaler - © 2022 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Antonio Frasconi - © 2022 Estate of Antonio Frasconi / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Grace Cranford Freund - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Phil Frost - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Jay Lynn Gomez - © Ramiro Gomez

Sidney Goodman - © Sidney Goodman Estate

Adolph Gottlieb - © 2022 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Red Grooms - © Red Grooms, Member of Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Martine Gutierrez - © Martine Gutierrez; Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

Robert Gwathmey - © 2022 Estate of Robert Gwathmey / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Nathan Cabot Hale - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Keith Haring - © Keith Haring Foundation

John Hartell - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Mona Hatoum - © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York (photo: Bill Orcutt)

Stanley William Hayter - © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Julie Heffernan - Reproduced with permission of the artist. © Julie Heffernan. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Joseph Heil - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Corin Hewitt - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Claude Howell - © Claude Howell Estate/ Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC.

Emily Jacir - © Emily Jacir

A.B. Jackson - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Bill Jacobson - © Bill Jacobson, courtesy Robert Klein Gallery.

Amy Jenkins - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Paul Jenkins - © Estate of Paul Jenkins 2023 / licensed by ADAGP

Yun-Fei Ji - © Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

Jasper Johns - © 2022 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Alex Katz - © 2022 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ellsworth Kelly - © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation

Ron Kleemann - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Darell Koons - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Birgit “Gitte” Krøncke - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Carter Kustera - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Joe Lasker - © Estate of Joe Lasker

Robert Lazzarini - Courtesy of the artist.

Alfred Leslie - © Alfred Leslie

Roy Lichtenstein - © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

William R. Lidh - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Glenn Ligon - © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist.

Robert Longo - © 2022 Robert Longo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Whitfield Lovell - © Whitfield Lovell, Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, NYC

Luis Mallo - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Robert Mangold - © 2022 Robert Mangold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Christian Marclay - © Christian Marclay

Reginald Marsh - © 2022 Estate of Reginald Marsh / Art Students League, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Suchitra Mattai - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Rita McBride - © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

George McNeil - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Beatriz Milhazes - © Beatriz Milhazes Studio

John Monti - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Andrew Moore - © Andrew Moore. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery

Julie Moos - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Richard Mosse - © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Robert Motherwell - © 2022 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Zanele Muholi - © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson Cape Town/ Johannesburg

Odd Nerdrum - © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / BONO, Oslo

Shirin Neshat - © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Louise Nevelson - © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Gladys Nilsson - © Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Hugh O’Donnell - © Hugh O’Donnell 1985

Jules Olitski - © 2022 Jules Olitski Art Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Ed Paschke - © 1984, Ed Paschke, Rouge Clair, 40" x 60", Mixed Media

Philip Pearlstein - © 2022 Philip Pearlstein / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso - © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jody Pinto - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Lari Pittman - © Lari Pittman, Regen Projects

Fairfield Porter - © 2022 The Estate of Fairfield Porter / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Dennis Potter - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Ray Prohaska - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Joseph Raffael - © Joseph Raffael. Courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Robert Rauschenberg - © 2022 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Milton Resnick - © The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

Rashaun Rucker - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Miriam Schapiro - © 2022 Estate of Miriam Schapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Collier Schorr - © Collier Schorr. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Ben Shahn - © 2022 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Anne Kesler Shields - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Yinka Shonibare - © Yinka Shonibare CBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS/ARS, NY 2022

Shahzia Sikander - © Shahzia Sikander, Courtesy: Sean Kelly.

Herbert Singleton - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Sandy Skoglund - © Sandy Skoglund; Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

Kiki Smith - Reproduced with permission of the artist. © Kiki Smith

Francis Speight - © Francis Speight

Nancy Spero - © 2022 The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Thomas Struth - © Thomas Struth 2023

Hiroshi Sugimoto - © Hiroshi Sugimoto

Do-Ho Suh - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Kathlyn Sullivan - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

James Surls - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Jorge Tacla - © Jorge Tacla

Bob Timberlake - Reproduced with permission of the artist. © Bob Timberlake, Inc.

Fred Tomaselli - © Fred Tomaselli 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

Betty Tompkins - © Betty Tompkins

Salman Toor - The Meeting © 2020 Salman Toor. All rights reserved.

Robert Vickrey - © 2022 The Estate of Robert Vickrey / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

John Waddill - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Meg Webster © Meg Webster

William T. Wiley - © William T. Wiley

Jonas Wood - Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Paul Wunderlich - Copyright retained by artist or artist’s representative.

Sun Xun - © Sun Xun, Courtesy: Sean Kelly

Acknowledgments

Over the past six decades, there have been hundreds of people who have played critical roles in forming and nurturing the Reece Collection, from administration, faculty, staff and parents of Wake Forest University, to the more than 100 artists whose work is included, to all the art dealers and galleries who worked closely with our students.

A special thank-you to Beth McAlhany (’89) and Minta McNally (’74, P ’02, P ’06) along with their colleagues in University Advancement who work to elevate and bring support to the Reece Collection.

With appreciation to the 60th Anniversary Reece Collection Steering Committee: Co-Chairs:

J. D. Wilson (’69, P ’01) and Cristin Tierney (’93).

Alumni & Parent Committee Members: Kayla Amador (’19); Mary Leigh Cherry (’97); Sarah Comegno (’21); Cathy Dishner (P ’21); Jacqueline Dishner (’21); Margi Gristina (’90, P ’23); Bowen Miller (’87, P ’14, P ’17, P ’18, P ’21); James Morrill (’05); John Reece (’81, P ’09, P ’14); Meaghan Steele (’11) and Catherine Woodard (’80, P ’13).

Faculty & Staff Committee Members: Jessica Burlingame, Collections Manager; John J. Curley, Associate Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Department; Jennifer Finkel, Acquavella Curator of Collections, Office of University Art Collections; Laura Giovanelli, Associate Dean for Learning Spaces, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English; Leigh Ann Hallberg (P ’12), Teaching Professor, Art Department; Hayes Henderson, Assistant Vice President, Creative Communication, Advancement; Beth McAlhany, Senior Director of Development, College Initiatives; Christina Soriano, Vice Provost for the Arts and Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Associate Professor of Dance, Department of Theatre & Dance; and Steve Morrison, Wake the Arts Communications Strategist.

Because of a remarkable gift from John (’81) and Libby Reece (P ’09, P ’14), an endowed fund has been established that will perpetually honor the vision and passion of their father and father-in-law, former Dean of Students Mark H. Reece (’49, P ’77, P ’81, P ’85). Other Wake Foresters have been inspired by the Reeces’ challenge to raise this fund to $1 million and have made generous gifts that will ensure the care and conservation for the newly named Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art. We offer our deepest appreciation to the Reeces and to Reece Conservation Fund benefactors. We encourage you to visit artcollections.wfu.edu/reece-collection-honor-roll to celebrate the honor roll of those who have made this critical resource possible and to consider making a gift of partnership and support.