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.

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.

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.