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.

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.

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?