The Brooklyn Museum has announced nearly five hundred new acquisitions that span from the sixth century to today and include Korean objects, Italian Renaissance portraiture, and contemporary works by John Edmonds, Jeffrey Gibson, KAWS, Rick Lowe, Amy Sillman, and Kara Walker, as well as forty significant, rare objects and masterworks that expand the Arts of Korea collection.
The additions collectively illustrate the Museum’s evolving approach to collecting that aims to critically interpret the art historical canon and facilitate meaningful conversations among people of different perspectives.
The artworks were acquired between December 2020 and October 2021 and expand the Museum’s holdings of some of today’s most influential artists, welcoming to the collection, for the first time, works by Laura Aguilar, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Jeffrey Gibson, Sky Hopinka, Susan Janow, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Jerome Lagarrigue, Rick Lowe, Thaddeus Mosley, and Christopher Myers.
Highlights of the contemporary acquisitions include a new film by Kara Walker that responds to the January 6th, 2021, attacks on the U.S. capitol by right-wing extremists; an exceptional painting by Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, growing the Museum’s representation of modern Indigeneity; two photographs by John Edmonds, selected from his UOVO Prize exhibition held at the Museum; a participatory monument by Paul Ramírez Jonas; a painting by Rick Lowe inspired by the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre; five films by John Akomfrah, Nicholas Galanin, Ja’Tovia Gary, Christine Sun Kim, and Tourmaline, all newly commissioned by MTV and the Museum; and a prototype of a 2018 KAWS Chair, a collaboration between the eponymous street artist and Fernando and Humberto Campana of Estudio Campana that features dozens of KAWS’s pink BFF figures. Other acquisition highlights include five photographs by artist Laura Aguilar, a painting by Russell Craig, a 16mm film installation by Sky Hopinka, videos by Susan Janow, a vibrant painting from the 1970s by Dindga McCannon, an imposing sculpture by Thaddeus Mosley, a photograph by Taryn Simon, part of Red Grooms’s groundbreaking 1976 installation Ruckus Manhattan, and works by Alvaro Barrington, Lauren Halsey, James Hough, Jesse Krimes, Tim Rollins, and Cameron Rowland.
Highlights of acquisitions and gifts also include a rare and unique Northern Italian Renaissance portrait of a Black man clothed in fine garments — possibly ecclesiastical, ambassadorial, or theatrical — which serves as an important expansion of the narrative told by the Museum’s other Renaissance artworks; and a sizable gift of forty objects from the Carroll Family Collection, which adds significant new dimensions to the Museum’s Arts of Korea holdings, including the first large-scale Buddhist sculpture to be added to the collection.
More information can be found online.
Photo of The Commons by Paul Ramírez Jonas.
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