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.

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.