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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.