New Mexico Museum of Art Unveils Recently Donated Works

Written by Katherine Ware Wednesday, 05 October 2011 21:49

SANTA FE, NM.- New Arrivals: Works from the Collection is an exhibition of recent acquisitions to the Museum's permanent collection. New Arrivals highlights the important role the art patron plays in developing a Museum's collection-either through an outright donation or partnering with the Museum in a purchase. The works in New Arrivals: Works from the Collection will be on view for the first time featuring favorite New Mexico artists such as Susan Rothenberg and Gunnar Plake, among others, to the internationally recognized Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein.

Approximately twenty-five works will be exhibited in nearly all media (including a skateboard by Artemio Rodriguez).

New Arrivals: Works from the Collection opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Friday, February 12, 2010 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. A reception will be hosted by the Women's Board of the Museum of New Mexico.

Exhibition curator Katherine Ware, curator of photography at the Museum, said; "The permanent collection is at the core of everything we do here at the Museum. It is especially wonderful, through the generosity of our community of donors, to share these treasures with the public for whom we hold these works in trust."

The focus of New Arrivals: Works from the Collection will be contemporary works donated to the permanent collection. Work from other eras will be shown, such as Milton Rogovin's photographs of New York City's Lower East Side and a William Lumpkins landscape, Untitled (Red Butte), 1933.

Museums rely primarily on donations of artwork from various sources as acquisition funds are always limited. A highlight of this exhibition and these donations is that these works deepen the Museum's collection of art of the Southwest and more specifically art by New Mexico artists while broadening the permanent collection with works by artists such as Francis Bacon and Dali.

The New Mexico Museum of Art building dates only to 1917, but its architects looked to the past, and based the design on the 300 year-old mission churches at Acoma and other pueblos. It shares the graceful simplicity of pueblo architecture and the sense of being created from the earth. In turn, the building established the Pueblo Spanish Revival style of architecture, for which Santa Fe is known.

The architects, Rapp and Rapp, had built the wildly successful New Mexico pavilion for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. They enlarged and modified that design and proposed it for the new art gallery. The Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico opened in 1917, and many of the works that were exhibited at the opening remain in the collection today.

The early Art Gallery’s “open door” policy encouraged artists working in New Mexico to exhibit their work, since Santa Fe’s commercial gallery network was years away. That welcome, mixed with the excitement about New Mexico that was generated by the tourism industry, enticed artists with formal training from other parts of the country. The resulting blending and cross-influences of Native American, Hispanic, and European-based cultures created a unique body of work that is the basis of the New Mexico Museum of Art collection.

The museum changed its name over the years, as it grew and redefined its mission. The current name, The New Mexico Museum of Art, was adopted in 2007 to reflect the breadth of New Mexico art.  Its previous name, "The Museum of Fine Arts" had been adopted in 1962.  Visit : http://www.nmartmuseum.org/

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