Recent Acquisitions

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Analia Saban works across the mediums of painting, drawing, weaving, and sculpture to challenge viewers’ expectations of what constitutes a work of art. In so doing, she creates new hybrid forms that expand traditional notions of artmaking, simultaneously playing on art historical references, including the history of minimalism, while experimenting with new techniques and technologies. One of Saban’s unconventional methods is to weave “threads” of dried acrylic paint through linen, producing works in which paint and canvas are physically intertwined. The series Woven Angle Gradient as Weft, comprised of six paintings that focus on a primary or secondary color gradient, investigates the relationship between the analog and the digital. The compositions are inspired by image-editing software and suggest the stilled hands of a stopped clock, inviting the viewer to pause and reflect on notions of time and duration. Saban lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Ethiopian artist Elias Sime creates intricate and visually complex abstractions from discarded electronic waste, which he buys in recycling markets in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. With labor intensive precision, the artist painstakingly braids electrical wires and cuts up old motherboards, incorporating computer keyboards and keys, buttons, bottle caps, bead-like plastic components, and other electronic parts, which he then re-assembles in elaborate patterns. The series title Tightrope suggests the precarious balance a society or community must maintain between technological advancements and their inevitable impact on the environment. Sime’s use of these materials is not intended as a commentary on the evils of consumerism, however. Suggestive of aerial views, topographical formations, and organic shapes accentuated by blocks of color, Sime’s compositions instead emphasize our interconnectedness, both to each other, and to the earth in an aesthetic language all his own.  

Born in Arizona, Eamon Ore-Giron explores in his work a multiplicity of cultural referents, traditions, and materials. Informed by a wide range of historical legacies—from indigenous and Latino to classical European and modern avant-garde—Ore-Giron's visual language speaks to the confluence of form and content. His paintings bring together the timelessness and universality of geometric shapes while integrating the formal characteristics of artistic traditions from divergent time periods and regions. As is characteristic of his style, in this painting, shapes, lines and colors create a dynamic composition full of energy and movement. The title refers to each of the vertical forms, which the artist identifies as evoking the Roman numeral III, while at the same time referencing ancient columns and classical architecture. Inspired by the work of Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, this painting is part of an ongoing series that weaves together visual and historical elements.  

In 2020, Time magazine commissioned photographer Elinor Carucci to capture a selection of the distinctive collars worn by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The images accompanied the article "Portraits of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Favorite Collars and the Stories Behind Them," by Tessa Berenson, which was published in November of 2020. Each of Carucci's photographs focuses on one of the collars; set against a dark background, the emblematic objects stand out as signifiers of the Justice’s progressive and feminist perspectives. Known popularly as “RBG,” Justice Ginsburg was only the second woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Her collars, often gifts from admirers, colleagues, or students, were encoded with layers of meaning that frequently related the cases she was working on. For instance, the Court Collar on view here, was one of her favorites to wear to court, and the Pride Collar, a gift from a fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, showed her unyielding support for the LGBTQ community. The South American Collar, also on view here, was the last one she wore, only a few weeks before she passed.  

Steve Locke probes perceptions of race, memory and male identity through his multi-disciplinary practice. Coming out of his proposed, but ultimately unrealized Auction Block Memorial, which sought to recognize the Africans and African Americans whose trafficking and sale financed the building of Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block is both a tribute to, and a subversion of, Homage to a Square: Josef Albers’ famous investigation of the interactions of color and form through the nesting of squares of pigment. For this project, Locke inserts the rectangular form of the “auction block” motif, a powerful symbol of chattel slavery in the Americas, into each composition. As with Albers’ work, the application of color and the use of the grid are reliant on the tenets of modernist abstraction, but the ever-present form of the auction block centered in seas of rich, vibrant color is a constant reminder and poignant critique of slavery’s dark and persistent history. Locke lives and works in New York. 

Vaughn Spann was born in Florida and currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. In his artistic practice, he investigates issues of memory, personal experience, history, time, and space. In each piece, Spann emphasizes the formal elements contained within the work—color, shapes, and marks take on new meaning. His visual vocabulary oscillates between the figural, the abstract, and the gestural, and often addresses socio-political issues. This work is part of Spann’s Marked Man series, which features prominently the letter X against a colorful background rich with thick markings. The X is a reference to the artist’s personal experience: “They came from an interest in assigning new meaning to an extremely recognizable form. How can I take an X, allow it to be my muse for painting, invite conversations of color, line, form, yet allow it to open deeper conversations. I found myself severely traumatized by a stop and frisk altercation during college as I was profiled by the police while leaving a study session. I felt the weight of having to spread my legs and hold my hands up in the air which feels defenseless, violated and infuriated which sparked an interest into the form.” 

Artist Haegue Yang creates multimedia installations and sculptural works that interweave a range of materials, processes, and sensory experiences. Using the language of abstraction to explore themes of social and political histories—individual and national identity, migration and displacement, isolation and community, and ideas of doubling and halves—Yang often makes hybrid objects through the pairing of disparate materials or forms. Part of the artist’s ongoing series of kinetic sculptures that create sound, this work’s circular elements incorporate bells commonly associated with traditional Korean mysticism and culture and can be activated by human touch. As in all of Yang’s work, the presence of these haptic forms of copper and steel, in tandem with their potential for movement, creates a multi-sensory experience for the viewer. Yang lives and works between Seoul, South Korea, and Berlin, Germany. 

Born in Pomona, California, Kim Dingle explores in her work issues of gender, female childhood, personal experience, and myth. This painting is part of Dingle’s Restaurant Mandalas series created between 2012-2020. Combining elements of abstraction and figuration, the work speaks to the artist’s experience as a restaurant owner as well as to her artistic investigations into color and form. In 2003 Dingle paused her painting career to open a neighborhood restaurant, which she operated for ten years. This experience, including the daily food preparations and cleaning routines of the restaurant inform this piece. For her, the repetition of everyday tasks evokes a mandala’s contemplative quality. In this image we see the space from above; flat shapes of color conform the kitchen and dining areas, reducing them to their most elemental forms. The panel above presents a frontal perspective of three bowls of tomato bisque resting on the counter and ready to be served. While the piece exudes vibrancy in its colors and patterns, it signals a controlled, almost meditative experience. 

Born in Bosnia in 1975, Amer Kobaslija creates works of art that affirm his presence in a particular place and time, documenting his experiences and layering his own story. For him, painting is a way of chronicling his experience of different geographies, but also of the many people he encounters and befriends. Such is the case with Red Tide, a recent acquisition to the museum’s permanent collection. In the painting, a man stands tall, towering over a small dog between his feet. He looks down, pensive, his hands at his sides. Wearing only his shorts, his bare feet planted on the ground and his chest exposed, the man contemplates the devastation caused by natural phenomena. He was a friend of Kobaslija. They visited Ichetucknee Springs in Florida where the artist photographed him. Kobaslija’s friend passed away shortly after that day. Part of a series informed by his life experiences in Florida, the work memorializes the artist’s friend and comments on the dire situation of the environment. The scene is a reminder of the uneven effects of the climate crisis. The gestural application of paint highlights the man’s expression and the precarious circumstances that surround him.  

Kobaslija shares some thoughts about Red Tide: “While working on the painting, I remembered my deceased friend and the time we had spent together. I was thinking about the fragility of life and how fleeting it all is. The meaning and meaninglessness of it all. And how vulnerable our environment is, even more so in the age of global warming and the oceans rising. Living in the subtropical lowlands of Florida, the consequences of the impending natural catastrophe could be dire.” 

This painting is an effective example of how a work of art can speak to an individual’s experience while simultaneously articulating a point of view about universal concerns. There is much more to explore in the work: allusions to religious symbolism, the dead fish and tree stumps as a vanitas scene, the significance of a dog in the foreground as a metaphor for loyalty and dedication, and the rich markings that make the man’s face and body almost as if he were coming to life right before our eyes. A moment of vulnerability, but also of beauty, in a world where, to borrow Kobaslija’s words, life is fragile, and everything is fleeting.   

Nick Cave’s work is characterized by community participation and celebration. Born in Fulton, Missouri, the artist creates pieces in which sculpture, performance, and dance converge. His “soundsuits” consist of elaborate costumes that cover the entire body concealing the wearer’s identity, gender, race, and age. The suits incorporate sequins, raffia, fabric, buttons, and other common materials, evoking diverse traditions and cultural practices. Together with dancers, choreographers, and community members, Cave orchestrates performances in public spaces where passersby are encouraged to join in and participate. The artist created the first soundsuit in 1992 in response to the beating of Rodney King, an African American man, by California police officers. This incident of police brutality led Cave to reflect on his own identity as a Black man and the vulnerability that presents in contemporary society. In this piece the suits are activated by movement and sound, creating a powerful visual that celebrates freedom and community. In the artist’s own words: “I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question. I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?” 

Drawing on the rich traditions of figuration, murals, and history painting, Nina Chanel Abney combines representation and abstraction to create graphic works that critically investigate the dynamics of politics, race, sexuality, and public image. Abney’s unique visual style is influenced by diverse source material, including animation, graffiti, and hip hop. The artist improvises her compositions using stenciled shapes—dollar signs, X’s, evergreen trees, but also guns and skulls—asking viewers to consider the symbolism and meaning of each pattern. Helen with the Drip depicts a woodland setting of stylized tree leaves and conifers in which a Black figure caresses a fawn while an ominous human skull observes them from below. Part of a series titled The Great Escape, which challenges the traditional art historical association of pastoral landscapes with whiteness, this work presents an idyllic scene that reimagines the relationship between Black subjects and nature as a new space of refuge and leisure. Abney lives and works in New York. 

Born in the Bahamas, Tavares Strachan is among a group of compelling young artists driving the global art movement around issues of identity and social justice. Strachan’s ambitious, open-ended practice operates at the intersections of art, science, history, and politics, and his interests are wide-ranging, from aeronautics to astronomy to climate extremes. The artist mines these subjects to tell stories of cultural displacement and human aspiration in an effort to bring attention to issues of invisibility and to affect societal change. Gameboy is part of a series of collage and mixed media works that continue Strachan’s ongoing project to surface the unseen contributions and unrecorded histories of communities of color. With its map of constellations, game console schematic, silver bullets hanging vertically like raindrops, photographs of glaciers and water, and a repeated portrait of the Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie, the piece is emblematic of Strachan's style. 

American artist, Marcus Jansen, (b. 1968, New York) embodies a multi-lingual approach to art making. His paintings, often monumental in scale, reference many visual vocabularies – from narrative history painting to graffiti and street art. Richly layered in content and form, Jansen leverages his art practice as a method to synthesize and express the traumatic experiences of both civilian life and military experience.

Cohering through the lens of his early childhood spent growing up, first as a Black man in New York City during the rise of street art, and then later in Germany, as well as his service in the United States Army in multiple conflicts and tours of duty, Jansen’s paintings reveal the complexing and intensity of his personal history. His paintings explore how the spaciousness of one’s subconscious can be invaded by cultural signifiers both familiar and strange, a highly-caffeinated search and rescue of memory, and a hypervigilance resulting from an awareness of constant surveillance – all of which result in a disorienting sense of vulnerability.

The work in the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Plot #2, 2018, is resonant and haunting in its image and subject. A brick red typewriter, that feels partially stenciled onto a mustard yellow ground, is both the subject of the painting, and the set for another subtle narrative landscape that unfolds within the picture plane. Above the typewriter hangs a broken set of blinds, with the sketch of a hanging light bulb in the background. The offset blinds and bulb signify a space that has been violated, or that could be at any moment; and the image becomes more unsettling as one observes the minute figure that often populates Jansen’s paintings, as he traverses the space created in the lower left corner of the typewriter. The threatening mood of the painting alludes to histories of surveillance and power, and in a more reductive image, contains themes that are the foundation for Jansen’s practice.

There are multiple approaches to unpacking this work: the formal residue of graffiti, a reflection on the color palette and color theory, the compositional architecture of the image, the surreal qualities of the figure in a scale that is ever-shifting. This work will be poignant across many disciplines from psychology to history, as the artist so generously grants access to the most intimate, vulnerable and revealing aspects of his lived experience as an American, an ex-pat, a soldier and a survivor of Post-Traumatic Stress disorder.

For Carlos Dávila Rinaldi, airports are rich environments that stimulate his creativity: “People in a hurry, others lost looking for their gate or just learning of a delay, the all familiar airport scene where some of us begin to taste the rush of traveling to a familiar place or perhaps somewhere you’ve never been. Airports are my kind of habitat...sensory overload at its fullest.”  

Bold, gestural markings across the surface of this work suggest the sights, sounds, and movement of passengers through a terminal. Thick, black lines, patches of bright yellow, and red evoke the fast-paced nature of this environment. Like catching a glimpse of a suitcase rolling by or the colorful pattern of a passenger’s clothing, each area of the painting conveys the intense and chaotic experience of the airport. In smaller light blue, lavender, white and gray sections of the work, the artist seems to capture details of objects around him, those perhaps perceived while glancing around the gate and taking it all in. Here, Dávila Rinaldi dissects his experience of travel and transforms it into an equally intense and fragmentary visual. His expressive abstract style is informed by tachism, a mid-twentieth century artistic style characterized by spontaneously applied patches of color and the emphasis on the artist’s feelings and individual experience. 

Cultural memory, history, identity, resiliency, and community are core themes in Daniel Lind-Ramos' artistic practice. Created with discarded materials and everyday objects collected from his hometown of Loíza, Puerto Rico, his assemblages incorporate references to the area’s Afro-Caribbean heritage, the experience of his community, and the nuanced history of colonialism. This work celebrates the victory over the British navy in the Battle of San Juan in 1797 when a fleet led by Sir Ralph Abercromby assaulted the island to seize it from Spain. Local black militias in Loíza played a crucial role in the defeat of the British, a fact that is often overlooked in accounts of the event. Vencedor 1797 is a reminder of the resiliency of the Puerto Rican people when faced with adversity and speaks to the lasting effects of colonialism in the Caribbean. Various elements in the sculpture allude to Afro-Caribbean religions, manual labor, community, the land, and even local sports.

As a part of his artistic process, Matthew Brannon interviews veterans, reads countless books, digs through declassified documents, and visits historic sites. He draws from these sources to create richly layered, both technically and conceptually, mid-century-modern-styled screen prints that delve into the history of the Vietnam War (1955-1975). This work features Jacqueline Kennedy's (1929-1994) dressing room table in the White House, closely modeled after archival photographs. Through carefully curated objects-from photos of her husband, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), her sister Princess Lee Radziwill (1933-2019), and her daughter Caroline Kennedy (b. 1957), to elements of her beauty and fashion routine-these items reveal aspects of her life as first lady. Her dressing table, located in an intimate space of the White House, here, raises questions about her private and public persona as she reached iconic status. 

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, devastating the island and upsetting the lives of its 3.4 million residents who were without power in some areas for months. The deadly storm caused over $80 billion in damages, collapsed the island’s power grid, and destroyed infrastructure. In the days and weeks following the natural disaster, the death toll reported by the government became the center of a controversy. While the government of Puerto Rico insisted that the official death toll was 64, studies conducted by Harvard and George Washington Universities revealed the death toll was at least 2,975.  It was not until August 2018, nearly a year after the hurricane, that the local government raised the official death toll to the estimated 2,975, which was 46 times higher than its original count. 

One of Puerto Rico’s most prolific contemporary artists, Antonio Martorell was compelled to create ¿Quéslaque? Es que la… as a response to the Puerto Rican government’s unwillingness to acknowledge the true number of fatalities in the official narrative. In this work, the artist presents the outline of the island’s map composed of darkened, crossed-out obituaries, representing the massive loss of life as a result of the storm. This somber imagery coupled with the stark black background underscores the sense of death and mourning. The words ¿Quéslaque? Es que la… float in the dark space above and below the landmass and provide additional meaning to the image. To the question ¿Quéslaque? a slang phrase that asks whassup?, the response is Es que la… a reference to the word esquela, or obituary. This phrase also represents the beginning of an excuse or a failed explanation: es que la... means “what it is, is that...” This phrase was commonly heard from government authorities who, when confronted, provided insufficient answers to questions concerning the death toll.  

A third level of meaning alludes to Puerto Rico’s political status and its relationship to the U.S.: es que ELA points to the official name of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (ELA). This translates to Free Associated State, or Commonwealth, and for the artist, it signifies the territory’s colonial status. Following the hurricane, many denounced the insufficient aid given to Puerto Rico by the United States. This left many in Puerto Rico with their basic needs unmet. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans left the island altogether to seek better living conditions elsewhere. For Martorell, a vocal advocate for the victims and their families, “it is sacred order to bury the dead, name them, and count them so they are not forgotten.” 

Born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Rafael Trelles creates works characterized by the exploration of profound subject matter and by an unparalleled handling of the pictorial medium. In this painting, a white shirt floats above a crowded highway, filled with endless rows of cars stuck in a traffic jam below. A metaphor for the plight of contemporary humankind, the empty shirt functions as a visual representation of solitude as it drifts over the chaos. Inspired by Julio Cortázar’s (1914-1984) short story La autopista del sur, first published in 1964, Trelles’ austere painting contemplates social relations in times of crisis. Here, the soft and airy fabric of the shirt contrasts with the hard geometry of the stationary cars which, like in the story, are trapped in a months-long gridlock. By dividing the composition in two registers that contrast and complement each other, the artist comments on the complex nuances of individual and collective experience.