Recent Acquisitions

RECENT ACQUISITIONS IN THE MIDWEST

Cheryl Snay, Chair

Rex Koontz

University of Houston and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

rkoontz@uh.edu

Two Maya Incensarios at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Late Classic Maya art is often characterized as a zenith of Pre-Columbian creativity. The calligraphic line and vibrant, complex naturalism that are hallmarks of this style are on full view in a pair of ceramic censer stands (in the Maya literature, incensarios) from the Western region of the Late Classic Maya recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. We will compare the Houston incensarios with the finest examples in world collections. We will then discuss the baroque yet naturalistic depiction of the deities represented as well as the role of fire and smoke in Classic Maya ritualism in order to contextualize the care and expertise that went into making these incensario stands.

Erica Warren

Independent Curator

ericalwarren@gmail.com

Marguerite Thompson Zorach’s Nude and Flowers (1922)

In her work, Nude and Flowers (1922), Marguerite Thompson Zorach foregrounded the multi- sensory aesthetic engagements made possible through her use of textile media. The particolored looped (or “hooked”) woolen strips, pulled through and held in place by the woven linen ground, emphasize an approach to artmaking that incorporates the haptic as well as the visual. Zorach carried this engagement further with the large stylized flowers, foliage, and shells that surround the nude figure, their lushness and scale suggesting a potent olfactory and multi- dimensional tactile experience. The compression of space, in which the figure with dark flowing hair appears in repose, heightens the intimacy of the work and reinforces the artist’s particular use of abstraction, already established in her paintings. Though her approach to the composition remains recognizable in Nude and Flowers, especially in the subtly varied hues used to contour the volumetric form of the nude body, the subject and material tell an inclusive and nuanced story about Zorach’s practice and American modernism.

Zorach’s experimental, multi-disciplinary, and pragmatic practice carried through on ideals that artists, such as Louis Comfort Tiffany and Candace Wheeler, espoused during the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements in their calls for diverse artforms to be used in the production of a total work of art (gesamtkunstwerk) or complete artistic environment. These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists as well as those, especially Zorach, working during the interwar years, established a framework for modernist textiles in the period after World War II, when Abstract Expressionists such as Kenneth Noland worked with tapestry firms to produce textiles that could aesthetically and materially shape the postwar gesamtkunstwerk.

Jennifer M. Friess

Associate Curator of Photography, University of Michigan Museum of Art

jenfriess@gmail.com

19,000 Museum Visitors Can’t Be Wrong: Letting the Public Decide UMMA Acquisitions

In 2019–20, curators at the University of Michigan Museum of Art unprecedentedly invited the public to join us in selecting photographs for our permanent collection by voting for their top picks through the participatory exhibition Take Your Pick: Collecting Found Photographs. This hybrid acquisition-exhibition pointedly asked: who and what should be represented in the Museum’s collection, and how should we decide? In asking the public to share in the selection process, we wanted to explore what belongs in a museum’s permanent collection and why. This presentation will explore the novel approach to exhibition- and acquisition-making proposed by the Take Your Pick installation by unpacking the participatory process and results of the exhibition now that voting is complete and the top picks have been accessioned into the Museum’s collection.