Denver, CO -- In 2023, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) worked to broaden and deepen its collection through several significant acquisitions across its ten curatorial departments. This ongoing refinement and development of the museum’s holdings extends the DAM’s long-standing commitment to creating and maintaining a diverse collection that reflects its community and provides access and insight into cultures from around the world and through the centuries. Encompassing works by women and artists of color, including important contemporary voices, artworks acquired between Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 30, 2023, included both purchases and gifts. The museum also continued its tradition of adding works by artists in DAM-organized exhibitions to the permanent collection.

Key highlights of the past year’s acquisitions include:

-The first acquisition of work by noted designers Hamed Ouattara and Minjae Kim by any museum globally;

-Works by Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas which complement existing DAM holdings;

-117 works of pottery and weavings from the late 1800s to the 1990s by Indigenous artists;

-55 photographs by photographer Robert Adams from his Pawnee National Grassland series; and

-A significant collection of historic Kuba textiles including 19 ceremonial women’s skirts and 42 prestige panels

Architecture and Design

The Architecture and Design department acquired 130 objects by 42 artists and designers, 21 of whom are women and artists of color.

Marking the first museum acquisition of his career, Burkinabè designer and visual artist Hamed Ouattara is best known for creating colorful and weathered furniture from oil drums, hammered and shaped by hand. Ouattara’s Indigola Cabinet references indigo, a natural dye valued for generations in West Africa and once a high-status commodity in Europe which was used as currency in the British colonies, including as payment for enslaved Africans.

Contemporary African design has been a collecting focus for the department, and Ouattara—an important artistic figure on the African continent since the 1990s—is quickly gaining global recognition in the contemporary design scene.

Wendy Maruyama’s postmodern Mickey Mackintosh Chair blends the chair designs of renowned Arts and Crafts designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the pop-culture iconography of Mickey Mouse. The work is painted in Zolatone, a thick, sparkly industrial paint.

Multi-disciplinary designer Minjae Kim’s recent works explicitly reference traditional Korean objects while obscuring their meaning from unfamiliar viewers. Garb 4 resembles a hanbok, the iconic attire of Korea, and is meticulously crafted from fiberglass and resin. The first acquisition of Kim’s work by any museum, Garb 4 was commissioned by the Architecture and Design, Arts of Asia, and Textile Arts and Fashion departments collectively. This cross-departmental acquisition creates further opportunities for collaboration —continuing DAM’s long tradition in this vein and reaffirms design and material culture as inherently multi-disciplinary and conducive to multiple types of interpretations and stories.

Arts of Asia

In the past year, the Arts of Asia department acquired 32 works by 14 artists. Significant acquisitions include works by Afghan-Canadian artist Hangama Amiri, Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander and a pair of hanging scrolls by Japanese artist Okuhara Seiko

In her textile painting, Still-life with Jewelry Boxes and Red Roses, Hangama Amiri portrays a moment during a bride-to-be’s final preparations for a banquet or intimate gathering in her room. Under Taliban rule, many Afghan women have married “picture grooms,” men they have not actually met who may only be able to participate in these intimate events via portraits hung on the wall. This work suggests this kind of “meeting.”

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian painting traditions, including miniature painting, works on paper, video, mosaic, and sculpture and is distinguished for launching the neo-miniature movement. Her 1995 work, Uprooted, represents a rare example of Sikander’s early works on paper.

Art of the Ancient Americas

The Art of the Ancient Americas department acquired a work by Sandy Rodriguez that was originally commissioned by the museum for its 2022 exhibition, Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche and depicts the life of La Malinche in eight vignettes including her enslavement. In creating Mapa for Malinche and our Stolen Sisters, Rodriguez worked with the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women’s Foundation (MMIW) to locate the abduction sites marked on the map with red handprints. While the map draws attention to the shared history and trauma of Indigenous communities on both sides of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, plants scattered across the landscape—copied from the Codex Badiano Cruz, a 16th century book of medicinal plants and herbal remedies—offer a path for healing.

European and American Art before 1900

The European and American Art before 1900 department added five works to the collection, four of which were gifts. The acquisitions include a pastel drawing by Mary Cassatt, oil paintings by Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arthur Trevithin Nowell and Abrecht de Vriendt and a bronze sculpture by Edgar Degas.

The pastel by Mary Cassatt, Young Woman with a Straw Hat, is a significant enhancement to the 19th century American art collection and complementary to the museum’s other Cassatt pastel, Patty-cake. A study for a later oil painting by the artist, this pastel is a compelling example of the artist’s masterful skills as a draughtsman and colorist.

Woman Arranging her Hair by Edgar Degas also is an important addition to the collection, a counterpart to the department’s existing Degas sculptures, Grande Arabesque and Dancer Standing, and offering a rich comparison to other Degas artworks in the collection, especially the pastel drawings.

Latin American Art

The Latin American Art department added 38 works to the collection, ranging from an 18th century devotional work to several contemporary paintings from 2022, many by women and artists of color.

During the colonial period, the city of Quito was the most important production center of polychrome sculpture in South America. One of the most famous practitioners was Manuel Chili "Caspicara" though most works were produced by anonymous workshops employing multiple, often Indigenous or mestizo, artists. While further research is needed for a confirmed attribution, it is possible that this sculpture is by Caspicara.

Tessa Mars’ figurative paintings examine her experience in Haiti and her interest in the intergenerational transmission of oral culture and teachings. Most recently, she has been experimenting with bigger painting formats where human figures occupy a large area of the images. This painting specifically shows us the transformation of the vegetation and the human body, as well as a generational contrast in the women presented, exploring the educational role conversation plays in her poetics.

Modern and Contemporary Art

The department of Modern and Contemporary Art increased its holdings by 34 works, including pieces by 12 women and 16 artists of color. Significant acquisitions include works by vanessa german, Michael Ray Charles and Elias Sime.

A self-taught artist, poet, spoken-word performer and community organizer, vanessa german creates spaces for care and transformation through installations and communal rituals involving sculptures known as “power figures” or tar babies. Modeled on the Kongo tradition of nkisi, german believes her sculptures contain spiritual, mystical and feminist energies that offer protection. She adorns her assemblages such as TV Man (2023) with objects ranging from prayer beads and doll parts to soda bottles and AstroTurf.

In his groundbreaking paintings, Michael Ray Charles exposes the continued legacy of racist imagery and Black stereotypes of the American Antebellum South prevalent in contemporary society. (Forever Free) poof! features a muscular human figure seemingly chiselled from stone, with arms stretched and tied into the shape of a noose. Severed at the neck, the figure rises as if ascending to heaven with billowing clouds in place of its lost head.

Ethiopian artist Elias Sime merges collage and assemblage with West African traditions of weaving and braiding to create brightly-colored abstract tableaux that suggest topography, figuration and color fields. Sime often composes his works—including the new acquisition Tightrope—from discarded electronic components sourced from the Menalesh Tera (translated as “what do you have?”) section of open-air markets in Addis Ababa typically filled with e-waste from Western countries.

Native Arts

The Native Arts department—which encompasses the collections of Arts of Africa, Arts of Oceania and Indigenous Arts of North America—acquired 156 works by Indigenous artists from North America, three treasures by artists from Oceania, and two works by contemporary women artists, Merikokeb Berhanu and Selome Muleta, from Ethiopia. This included a significant gift of 117 works of pottery, weavings and watercolors from the late 1800s to the 1990s by Indigenous artists from the estate of Benjamin F. and Sarah A. Crane, 16 works by Native American contemporary artists from the collection of Brian Tschumper, and two works by artist Jeffrey Gibson from the Vicki and Kent Logan collection.

Jeffrey Gibson (Member of the Mississippi Band Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) describes CAN'T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU as a female ancestor who is here to guide him. He says, "They were actually inspired by a series of dreams in which I was traveling through landscapes and when I called my ancestors, a cloaked female spirit would appear and guide me. My conversations with this faceless, guiding figure began to define the sculptures." Gibson beaded the spirit’s words onto cloaks that became the sculptures’ bodies, noting “That is important: the garment is the body; to put it on is to transform and become the guide." This artwork was on view in 2018 as part of the DAM's exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer.

A fine Apache olla basket, likely made around 1900 and decorated with pictorial and geometric imagery featuring humans and animals, was bequeathed to the museum. Made by Western Apache artists from such groups as the Cibecue, San Carlos, White Mountain, and Northern and Southern Tonto, olla baskets were used for water storage or for seed and corn.

Wendy Red Star’s (Member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe) 1880 Crow Peace Delegation Series includes ten artist-manipulated historical portraits from the National Anthropological Archives. This series marks the beginning of Red Star's notable annotations of historical images—an action that intentionally reconnects such images with cultural and biographical knowledge related to the people depicted in the photographs.

Photography

There were 244 acquisitions by the Photography department in the past year, including works by 44 women photographers and 22 photographers of color.

These included 19 photographs by Anchorage-based photographer Brian Adams, which were featured in the recent exhibition, Personal Geographies: Trent Davis Bailey | Brian Adams. Informed and inspired by his Iñupiaq heritage, Adams has travelled across Alaska and beyond to photograph Indigenous communities, the surrounding landscape and explore contemporary life in the Arctic region of North America.

Photographer Robert Adams and his wife, Kerstin, began spending time on the plains of eastern Colorado when he was a fledgling photographer in the 1960s. The Pawnee National Grassland in northeastern Colorado state became their refuge after they moved to Longmont in 1971. The 63 photographs they gifted to the DAM—including 55 depicting the Pawnee National Grassland—evoke both the reassuring beauty of the landscape and the ease of their days spent on the prairie. The photographs formed the core of their books, Perfect Times, Perfect Places (Aperture, 1988) and A Portrait in Landscapes (Nazraeli Press, 2005).

As a child, Jean Pagliuso helped her father breed and show Bantam Cochin chickens. As an adult, she has been a highly successful fashion and portrait photographer. Pagliuso adapted her fashion approach to the lighthearted and personal “Poultry Suite,” posing showy, exotic-looking chickens against a plain white background and photographing under diffuse light to create a striking series of “portraits,” including Variegated #17.

Textile Arts & Fashion

In the past year, the Textile Arts and Fashion department added 76 acquisitions to its collection, with a substantial number by women and makers of color, attributed and unrecorded, contemporary and historic.

As a result of the excitement and press surrounding the re-opening of the Arts of Africa galleries, the department was offered a significant collection of historic Kuba textiles—19 ceremonial women’s skirts and 42 prestige panels. Prized luxury goods like these textiles were offered to the king in annual tribute, along with his other spoils like cowry shells, iron and ivory. Between the 1970s and early 2000s, Kuba ruler Nyimi Kwete Mbokashanga began selling objects from his royal collection to art markets in the Congo and abroad. This gift traces back to this royal lineage. Many Western artists found inspiration from Kuba textiles, including Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt and Henri Matisse.

Elizabeth Talford Scott was born in 1916 near Chester, South Carolina, to sharecropper parents who worked the same land on which her grandparents were enslaved. She learned to quilt as a child, often repurposing scrap material and used clothes, much in the tradition of African American quilt making. Over many years working in the quilt medium, Talford Scott’s art evolved from domestic function into improvisational, sculptural wall hangings.

Pulsating with energy, Sick Eye (1980) is created in a low-relief and set against a printed calico fabric in earth tones and muted blues. The composition bursts forth in shocking red and black tentacles emerging from an embroidered circle. Sick Eye is autobiographical in nature, as Scott created the piece while suffering from cataracts, a condition that partially shrouded the world she saw.

The department also acquired works by contemporary Mexican fashion designer Carla Fernández, the subject of the 2022 exhibition Carla Fernández Casa de Moda, contemporary Indian artist Saroj Chaterlal Rathod and several rugs from West Asia woven by unattributed women artists.

Western American Art

The Petrie Institute of Western American Art added 16 works to its holdings in the last year, including two paintings by Arthur Okamura.

As a young boy, Okamura was incarcerated during WWII at the Granada Relocation Center (Amache) in Colorado with his family. He later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Yale School of Art and the University of Chicago. Moving to California in 1956, he ultimately ended up in the artist community in Bolinas, California. Drawn to the abstract work of Willem de Kooning, Okamura frequently painted abstract landscapes.

Also entering the collection last year was a landscape by Marion Kavanagh Wachtel. Painted near Pasadena, California, the large, bright Sycamores is one of the few major oil paintings executed by the artist, who was associated with the California Impressionists of the early 20th century.

The department also added two bronze sculptures to its holdings—The Still Hunt by Edward Kemeys and Stone Age in America by John J. Boyle.

Throughout the curatorial departments of the DAM, the varied artworks added to the collection in the past year reinforce the museum’s mission to further enlarge the range of voices represented and continues to extend the scope of stories the DAM can tell in its galleries.