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.

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.

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.”