Denver Art Museum Announces 2022 Acquisitions

With the exception of a late 1800s Scholar’s Desk from Korea, gifted in honor of the appointment of Hyonjeong Kim Han as head of the Arts of Asia department, each of the works added to the collection were created in the last hundred years.

Three of the acquisitions are works by Lim Ok-Sang, a South Korean artist at the center of the Minjung (People’s Art) movement, a name coined during the Gwangju Democratic Uprising in 1980. In one of the newly acquired works, Not a Bowl II, the artist incorporates clay—a medium traditionally used in making ceramics—on his 2021 canvas. In the last decade, Lim has created paintings depicting the desire to dwell in peaceful nature, nature’s relationship with human beings and embracing freedom.

An additional contemporary Asian art acquisition is 2016-9-30 by Fong Chung-ray, an artist born in China, active previously in Taiwan, and currently living in the Bay Area. Fong is one of the major figures in the Fifth Moon Group, the Taiwanese ink art movement.

The Arts of the Ancient Americas department made three additions to the collection, including a goblet that represents an outstanding example of Cholula-style ceramics crafted by an unknown Mixtec artist. Drinking vessels like this small goblet were designed for the consumption of chocolate or pulque, a fermented alcoholic beverage.

Two additional pieces were joint acquisitions with the Latin American Art department—one each from the recent exhibitions ReVisión: Art of the Americas and Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche.

Eduardo Sarabia’s Ceiba Sagrada (featuring the Roseate Spoonbill, Lovely Continga, Quetzal, and the Squirrel Cuckoo), originally on view as part of ReVisión, features a framed image of a cross-cut green ceiba tree surrounded by more than two dozen vibrantly colored, cast-metal birds. Sarabia represents four distinct species—cuckoo, roseate spoonbill, cotinga and quetzal—each of which contributed feathers to the elaborate headdress associated with Moctezuma, the ruler of the Aztec empire.

In a shimmering painting on copper ground, artist Vicente Telles depicts La Malinche, a young Nahua girl who played a pivotal role during the Conquest of Mexico, or the Spanish and Aztec war. The composition of this work recalls traditional representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A key addition to the museum’s Southwest Santos collection, it references the important cultural history of mestizo (mixed-race) people in New Mexico and Colorado through the story of the historical figure of La Malinche.

The department of European and American Art before 1900 added seven paintings to the collection, ranging from the 16th century Portrait of a Man by a Netherlandish artist to a 1904 work by Monet’s son-in-law, Theodore Earl Butler.

The distinctive white chalk cliffs that Butler painted in 1904 while sojourning in Quiberville on the Normandy coast demonstrate the artist’s fascination with colors and brushstrokes, clearly influenced—in both technique and subject matter—by his father-in-law, Claude Monet. In addition to works inspired by the Impressionist movement, Butler experimented with other emerging styles, including neo-impressionism and fauvism.

The 17 acquisitions made by the department this past fiscal year included five artworks by women artists, the bequest of a lacquer Maque chest (arqueta) from the 1770s and the gift of seven color woodcut prints. These works add to the museum’s newly created but rapidly expanding Latin American Contemporary Art collection. The department is committed to challenging preconceptions about the boundaries of Latin America through the inclusion of Caribbean artists and to expanding the representation of women artists in the permanent collection.

A key acquisition for the department is a painting by Dominican artist Hulda Guzmán, who explores how her painting practice can relate to landscape, animal life and fiction. In Jusqu’ici tout va bien (So far, so good), a cartoonish female figure that resembles the artist grabs her sun hat to keep the wind from blowing it off as she gazes directly at the audience, drawing us into her world. Guzmán is one of 19 artists featured in Who tells a tale adds a tail: Latin America and contemporary art, on view through March 5, 2023.

Arthur Timótheo da Costa’s painting Portrait of a Boy is the first Brazilian artwork from the early 1900s to enter the DAM’s collection. Born in 1882 to a family of African descent in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, da Costa began his art studies at a young age at the Casa da Moeda do Brasil (Brazilian Mint), where he studied drawing and engraving. Overcoming the widespread race and class prejudices and limitations of that time, da Costa had a remarkable artistic career, exhibiting his works regularly until the early 1920s, when his mental health rapidly declined.

In 2022, the museum’s annual Collectors’ Choice event raised nearly $800,000, and the net proceeds will support future acquisitions of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

The Photography department added 193 new works to the collection through both gifts and purchases, with a strong representation of women photographers (127 pieces) as well as 10 works by artists of color. In addition to the highlights below, photos by such noted artists as Arthur Wesley Dow, Richard Benson, Andrea Modica, W. Eugene Smith, Yolanda Andrade, Mariana Yampolsky and the Sweet Medicine portfolio of 30 photos by Drex Brooks also were acquired.

In his series America’s Endangered Coasts, John Ganis photographed human-created landscapes likely to be erased by the effects of climate change. In Beach Houses After Hurricane Sandy, 959 East Avenue, Mantoloking, New Jersey, a crumpled, shingle-style beach house is on the left, while the house on the right hovers thirty inches in the air—the beach and the house’s foundation washed away in the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. In the background, the vast, unpredictable ocean stretches to the horizon.

With sharp intuition and quick reflexes, Lola Álvarez Bravo described the everyday lives of ordinary Mexicans with fluidity and grace. Her photograph Mar de ternura (Sea of Tenderness), from about 1945, is a gentle and evocative example of her approach.

Zora J. Murff’s series At No Point In Between focuses on people and places in the historically Black neighborhood of North Omaha, Nebraska, where the artist grew up. His photographs suggest informal conversations that give presence to both the photographer and his subjects as they negotiate life in a place that has been shaped by acts of racial violence and continues to suffer from the effects of redlining and economic suppression. As Murff puts it, the pictures in At No Point In Between “…metaphorically connect the body and the landscape, fast and slow violence.”

The Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the DAM added 12 works to the collection, including an outstanding nocturne by Frank Tenney Johnson, the first work to enter the collection by Alexandre Hogue, and seven pieces by Chiura Obata, one of the most significant Japanese American artists working on the West Coast during the last century.

Obata emigrated to the United States from Japan in 1903. His nearly two-decades-long tenure as a professor at UC Berkeley (1932-1954) was interrupted during World War II from 1942 to 1945. He and his family were forced to move first to the relocation center in Tanforan, CA, and then to the incarceration camp at Topaz, UT. While at these camps, Obata helped found a number of art schools.

Obata engaged with a wide array of traditions and techniques during his long career. As a result, his work often defies strict cultural categorization. The acquisition of these seven ink and watercolor artworks reinforces the Petrie Institute’s mission to reveal the complexity of the cultural and artistic interchange intrinsic to the region we call the American West.