Dallas Museum of Art exhibition celebrates 100 years of Art Donations

Written by Keith Downing Sunday, 12 February 2012 21:05

DALLAS, TX.- The Dallas Museum of Art celebrates more than one hundred years of benefaction from its major donors with the release of a new collection handbook this February documenting the Museum’s transformative growth since its founding in 1903. The 368-page full-color handbook provides an overview of the quality, breadth, and depth of the Museum’s encyclopedic collection, and emphasizes the tremendous impact of the Museum’s longtime patrons on the DMA, who enabled the Museum to grow from a regional resource into one of the nation’s leading arts institutions. With an introduction by former Museum director Bonnie Pitman, the guide highlights more than four hundred works of art with new photography and scholarship, and showcases in particular recent gifts and major acquisitions from the past fifteen years, including the Museum’s strengthened holdings of contemporary art, European and American art, decorative arts and design, African art, Indonesian art, and the work of Texas artists.

In conjunction with the new handbook, Museum curators and educators have organized a special exhibition pairing approximately sixty works that have been gifted to the Museum by longstanding donors. On view from February 12th through June 10th, Face to Face: International Art at the DMA not only sheds new light on linkages between artworks from different disciplines, regions, and time periods but also underscores the diverse collecting interests of the Museum’s donors and their shared vision to expand the Museum’s collection across a comprehensive range, both geographically and chronologically. Seminal works featured in the exhibition, as well as throughout the Museum’s galleries, are profiled in greater depth through nearly fifty new additions to the Museum’s smARTphone tour, available at DMA.mobi.

“This new catalogue, and in turn the related programming, serves as testament to the remarkable dedication of the individuals who have given so generously to the Dallas Museum of Art over the decades and who have worked to give our collection a diversity and richness that inspires new discoveries every day,” said Bonnie Pitman, former Eugene McDermott Director at the DMA and co-organizer of Face to Face. “We are deeply grateful for their inspired vision and exceptional contributions that have led us down new paths of inquiry and to the creation of countless exhibitions, research projects, and public programs. They have left an incredible legacy for the Museum and community. ”


“Dallas has an extraordinary community of collectors who have provided the DMA with sustained support over decades. Our patrons have been pivotal in the creation of a large, superb collection for broad public enjoyment,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Eugene McDermott Director at the DMA. “I look forward to collaborating with these discerning and generous supporters to add to the Museum’s encyclopedic collection.”

Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection ($24.95; paperback; 368 pages) provides an overview of the Museum’s holdings, which span more than five thousand years of world history and form the foundation for the Museum’s programming. Organized by collecting area, the guide profiles some four hundred masterworks that exemplify the breadth and depth of the collection. The catalogue includes an introduction by Bonnie Pitman, former Eugene McDermott Director, and contributions by Museum curators Olivier Meslay, Anne Bromberg, Jeffrey Grove, Heather MacDonald, Carol Robbins, Kevin W. Tucker, and Roslyn Adele Walker, among others. 

Face to Face: International Art at the DMA was conceived and organized collaboratively by the Dallas Museum of Art’s curatorial staff, led by Bonnie Pitman and Anne Bromberg, The Cecil and Ida Green Curator of Ancient and Asian Art, working with the Museum’s education and exhibitions departments.

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