ACQUISTION: Sam Gilliam / "Dance Me, Dance You 2, #1" / Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

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Sam Gilliam, Dance Me, Dance You 2, #1, #2, #3, 2009, acrylic on polyester

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On Wednesday, May 11, 2011 the Museum of  Contemporary Art San Diego�s International Collectors and Contemporary Collectors voted to purchase an exuberant draped canvas by Sam Gilliam, Dance Me, Dance You 2 #1 (2009). The decision was made during their 2011 Collectors' Selection Dinner.

In the mid-1960s, African-American artist Sam Gilliam challenged the traditional format of painting by taking his canvases off the wall and off their stretchers. The resulting works, suspended in the air, emphasized process and they turned paintings into colorful sculptures. Today Gilliam continues his investigation of poured colored, stained canvas, and draped and floating forms. In Dance Me, Dance You 2, #1, brilliantly stained fabric billows into a skirted form that conveys musicality and movement.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO (MCASD)

Founded in 1941, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is the preeminent contemporary visual arts institution in San Diego County. The Museum�s collection includes more than 4,000 works of art created since 1950. In addition to presenting exhibitions by international contemporary artists, the Museum serves thousands of children and adults annually at its varied education programs, and offers a rich program of film, performance, and lectures. MCASD is a private, nonprofit organization, with 501c3 tax-exempt status; it is supported by generous contributions and grants from MCASD Members and other individuals, corporations, foundations, and government agencies. Dr. Hugh M. Davies is The David C. Copley Director and CEO at MCASD.

Institutional support for MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the James Irvine Foundation.

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ACQUISTION: Laylah Ali / Untitled (Greenheads) / Davis Museum and Cultural Center / Wellesley, MA

Laylah Ali, Untitled (Greenheads), 1998. Gouache on Paper, 8 3/4 in x 13 3/4 in.

Davis Museum purchase, Emma B. Sands Jewett Art Fund, 2010.45.

Laylah Ali, Untitled (Greenheads), 1998 

Text by Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director

Significant within her oeuvre, Laylah Ali�s Untitled demonstrates her critically acclaimed �greenheads� series � spare gouache paintings that render brightly colored characters with big round heads against distinctive sky-blue planes. In composition and style (here, employing segmented frames), her images reference comics and employ the graphic punch and egalitarian accessibility associated with that medium to new effect. Deceptively simple, the work displays the artist�s technical virtuosity and erudition, a combination of conceptual precision and an intuitive grasp of the communicative power of her medium. Ali�s careful choices � stripping figure and ground to the barest essentials, juxtaposing cheerful color and dark subject matter, and selecting a small format to further condense the work�s charge � are strategic; they render the images highly evocative, open to multiple interpretations and resistant to complete definition.

Ali sets her characters, in groups or alone, into uncertain circumstances to suggest stories with shadowy outcomes. Signs and symbols (ie. ancient Egyptian dress and hair styles; priestly raiment) reappear throughout the work, functioning like components of an artistic alphabet or as keys to a language that is obscured yet familiar. Pervasive themes� violence and passivity, affiliation and alienation, parity and inequality� link Ali�s images to historical and contemporary circumstances, to political, social, and cultural conditions.

With a distinctive clarity of purpose, her work insists on viewer participation, and it is through this vital act of looking and complicity in the construction of meaning that Ali�s oeuvre in turn enriches the contemporary art dialogue.

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MEDIA NEWS: National Gallery of Art Acquires Kerry James Marshall "Great America" Painting

Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994, acrylic and collage on canvas

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2011

WASHINGTON, D.C. -  The Collectors Committee of the National Gallery of Art recently made possible the acquisition of Great America (1994) by Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955)?the Gallery�s first painting by the mid-career African American artist. The work will be on view beginning May 1 in the East Building's Concourse galleries.

"This year, the Collectors Committee's brought the Gallery a powerful painting by Kerry James Marshall," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are very grateful to the Collectors Committee, which enables the Gallery to continually enhance its holdings of contemporary art."

A devoted student of the human figure and the history of art, especially the genres of portraiture and narrative, Marshall draws upon the experience of African Americans like himself to create imposing, contemporary history paintings.

Marshall's mature career can be dated to 1980, when, inspired by the opening lines of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, he developed his signature motif of a dark, near-silhouetted figure in A Portrait of the Artist as His Former Self. Refusing both negative and positive stereotypes of black people, Marshall's figures of "extreme blackness" operate, he explains, "right on the borderline," forcing the viewer to find nuance and articulation within only apparently black forms. This strategy has been influential for younger artists, including Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon.

Great America is contemporaneous with Marshall's well-known Garden Project (1994-1995), a series of paintings based on housing projects with "gardens" in their names, such as Nickerson Gardens in Watts, where he grew up. In those works, Marshall sought to convey the dignity and complexity of lives set within difficult circumstances. In this work, he re-imagines a boat ride into the haunted tunnel of an amusement park as the Middle Passage of slaves from Africa to the New World. What might in other hands be a work of heavy political irony becomes instead a delicate interweaving of the histories of painting and race. The  painting, which is stretched directly onto the wall, creates a screen or backdrop onto which viewers project their own associations triggered by the diaphanous yet powerful imagery.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Kerry James Marshall grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Otis Art Institute. After spending time as a fellow at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he moved to Chicago in 1987, where he still lives and works.

Source Link: http://www.nga.gov/press/2011/cc_2011.shtm