AFA 18th Anniversary

collection of glassware, furniture, lamps, and other decorative pieces. The Cleveland Museum of Art , one of the many museums seeking to expand their permanent collections in African-American a rt, purcha sed Norman Lewis’ 1960s Alabama, and was given Robert Colescott’s 1980 Tea for Two (The Collector) by Agnes Gund. In early December, the McNay Art Museum announced three major acquisitions, all collages, by African-American artists Benny Andrews, McArthur Binion, and Rashaad Newsome. The Saint Louis Art Museum received eighty-one works by contemporary African-American artists, including Stanley Whitney’s 1992 Out in the Open , from Ronald Maurice Ollie and wife Monique McRipley Ollie. The Baltimore Museum of Art added to its growing collection of works by African- American artists, with Mark Bradford’s 2016 mixed-media painting My Grandmother Felt the Color (purchased through anonymous donations) and the 2005 video Niagara (gift of the artist), also Autumn Flight (1956) by Norman Lewis (gift of several donors and acquisition funds). The High Museum in Atlanta purchased Kara Walker’s fifty-eight- foot-long cut-paper Fig. 8: Jessie T. Pettway, Bars and String-Pieced Columns , ca. 1950s. Cotton, 95 x 76 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum purchase, American Art Trust Fund, and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection. Artwork: © 2017 Jessie T. Pettway / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Fig. 7: Thornton Dial (1928-2016), Shack Town , 2000. 92 x 76 x 70 inches. © Estate of Thornton Dial. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/ Pitkin Studio. Courtesy New Orleans Museum of Art. silhouette installation The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin (2015), and acquired fifty-four works by thirty-three contemporary African-American artists from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose aim since 2010 has been to expand the recognition of leading contemporary African- American artists in the Southeast through support for exhibitions, programs and publications. In 2014, the Foundation began a program to transfer its collection to leading American and international museums. Another beneficiary of the Foundation’s gift-purchase arrangements in 2017 was the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco , which acquired sixty-two works of art made by twenty-two African-American artists—including Thornton Dial (Fig. 7), Lonnie Holley, and Ronald Lockett, which are currently in an exhibition that runs through April 2018; the New Orleans Museum of Art (Fig 8) and the Ackland Art Museum were also in receipt of the foundation’s collections, with the acquisition of ten and twelve works respectively. 2018 Antiques & Fine Art 101