AFA 20th Anniversary

20th Anniversary 102 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Left  Fig. 9: Tarsila do Amaral (Brazilian, 1886–1973), The Moon (A Lua), 1928. Oil on canvas, 43⅓ x 43⅓ in. Courtesy, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Right  Fig. 10: Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Running Freed More Slaves Than Lincoln Ever Did, 1995. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy, Baltimore Museum of Art (2019.27). © Mary Lovelace O’Neal. of Modern Art sold an untitled 1960 Mark Rothko painting from its collection for $50 million, and used the money to purchase artworks by Rebecca Belmore, Forrest Bess, Frank Bowling, Leonora Carrington, Lygia Clark, Norman Lewis, Barry McGee, Kay Sage, Alma Thomas, and Mickalene Thomas. Among these pieces is Mickalene Thomas’s 2011 painted portrait of a transgender woman named Qusuquzah, Qusuquzah, Une Très Belle Négresse 1 , Frank Bowling’s large- scale 2018 painting Elder Sun Benjamin, and Rebecca Belmore’s large-scale 2018 ceramic sculpture Tarpaulin No. 1 . The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington purchased a series of prints by conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, an 1871 oil painting by Robert Duncanson, and a 1940 poster by Robert Pious. The Thomas work, Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot (2018), was commissioned by the museum. In total, 74 percent of the museum’s acquisition funds spent in 2018 went toward acquiring works by women artists and artists of color. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens purchased a series of thirty-two etchings with aquatint (2005–14) by four artists who are part of the Gee’s Bend group of quilters. Also acquired was a 1969 collage, Blue Monday by Romare Bearden (1911–88). Collector and scholar Eli Leon bequeathed his collection of nearly three thousand works by African-American quiltmakers to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacif ic Film Archive at the University of California (Fig. 7). The gift, which includes more than five hundred works by Rosie Lee Tompkins, an artist who helped raise the profile of quilting in the art world, marks one of the largest gifts of African American art ever donated to a museum. Constance E. Clayton, a board member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art , where she founded the African American Collections Committee in 2000, donated seventy-eight works by African-American artists to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The collection spans from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, and includes pieces by Charles White, Sam Gilliam, and Romare Bearden, among others. The Saint Louis Art Museum set a new record for the artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) when they purchased at Swann Auction Galleries (for $389,000) her carved mahogany sculpture Seated Woman (1955–59) (Fig. 8). Catlett, the granddaughter of former slaves, used her art to advocate for social change against racism and for feminism, and worked in both the states and in her adopted Mexico. The Museum of Modern Art , acquired Tarsila do Amaral’s (Brazilian, 1886– 1973) The Moon (A Lua) , painted in 1928 (Fig. 9). Tarsila do Amaral is a foundational figure for modern art in Brazil, and a central protagonist in the transatlantic cultural exchanges that informed it. Her paintings from the 1920s ignited a radically new iconography of enduring influence in her native country. This is the artist’s first work to enter MoMA’s collection.