Recent Acquisition Highlights

William Christenberry (1936–2016) is best known for his artistic exploration of place, in particular the Black Belt region of Alabama, where he spent his childhood in Hale County. Working in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and assemblage, Christenberry focused on architecture, abandoned structures, and nature, and he studied the psychology and effects of place and memory. The National Gallery of Art has acquired the sculpture Memory Form II (1997–1998), a gift from Stephen Bennett Phillips in honor of Sandra Deane Christenberry, the artist’s widow.

In 1968 Christenberry moved to Washington, DC, where he quickly became a revered teacher and mentor at the Corcoran School of Art. However, his art remained focused on the landscape and built environment of Alabama, where he would return each summer to photograph shacks and stores and to collect signs and other artifacts that reflected the spirit of the place. His efforts were not simply nostalgic. Christenberry had an eye for decay and was deeply aware of the dark history of the region, with depictions of Ku Klux Klan hoods occasionally appearing in his work. Memory Form II is somewhat unusual in the artist’s oeuvre. Rather than a detailed, realistic model of a particular building, it is a poetic evocation of a general type of structure common in the South—the so-called dogtrot house with a central breezeway, which –Christenberry has reduced in this sculpture to a mysterious opening. As a result of the artist’s patient application of encaustic and paint to wood, the sculpture appears almost tomb-like, encased in time and memory.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired A Fleet at Sea (c. 1614), a major painting by the Haarlem artist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom (d. 1640). The first Dutch painter to specialize in seascapes and detailed portraits of specific ships, Vroom paved the way for later 17th-century marine painters with his lively, colorful, and harmonious compositions. A Fleet at Sea was featured in the 2018 exhibition Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. The National Gallery is grateful to Albert Beveridge and his late wife, Madzy, for their generous gift that has brought this important painting into the nation’s collection.

A Fleet at Sea portrays a historic event that took place many years before Vroom painted its likeness. A stiff breeze propels the billowing sails of a Dutch fluyt ship from the mouth of the Maas River onto the choppy waves of the North Sea. On the right side of the painting, the skyline of Den Briel, with its squat church tower, identifies the exact location of the scene. Vroom has also included several details that suggest that the heavily armed cargo ship in the foreground may be the Roode Leeuw (Red Lion), which left its home port of Rotterdam in 1597 for a well-documented voyage to the distant shores of South America and the Caribbean. The vessel’s figurehead is a bright red lion, and the flag of the province Holland (also with a red lion) appears atop the main mast. The inclusion of the municipal arms of Rotterdam on the red, white, and blue Dutch flag on the stern pole may be a nod to the Roode Leeuw’s home port. Research continues into a possible alternative identification of the ship as the Rotterdam-based Leeuwinne (Lioness), which rammed and destroyed Spanish galleys in 1602, an event that Vroom depicted in a 1617 painting.

Vroom’s extensive output in paintings and prints had a direct impact on the enormous popularity of marine painting in the Netherlands throughout the 17th century. His own sea voyages during the 1580s gave him a profound understanding of the architecture and rigging of ships, and of their interaction with wind and water in a wide range of conditions. Vroom’s career coincided with the dawn of Dutch global commercial expansion, and he received numerous lucrative commissions from shipowners, captains, and shareholders of the Dutch East and West India Companies.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) is celebrated for the pioneering exhibitions of modern European art that he presented at his gallery 291 in New York between 1907 and 1917 and for his support of American artists. Photography, his greatest passion, was not only the medium he used to express himself, but also the touchstone he employed to evaluate art. Donated by the Clark Collection to the National Gallery, Untitled (Helen Kastor Fleischmann), c. 1917, is a stunning platinum/ palladium print that helps to expand our understanding of the evolution of Stieglitz's art.

Through the exhibitions he organized, the periodicals he published, and the example of his own work, Stieglitz played a central role in the acceptance of photography as a mode of artistic expression. He also championed the work of numerous American photographers from Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, and Edward Steichen to Paul Strand and Ansel Adams.

At the time Stieglitz took this picture, Helen Kastor Fleischmann, a wealthy cutlery heiress, was married to Leon Fleischmann, a poet and one of the many artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals who frequented Stieglitz’s gallery; she later married James Joyce’s son, Giorgio. Although Stieglitz described her in a 1917 letter to Georgia O’Keeffe as “pretty, vivacious,” he chose to focus on Fleischmann’s hands and legs rather than on her face. Most likely made in 1917, the picture is an early example of Stieglitz’s radical rethinking of the nature of a photographic portrait. Inspired by Auguste Rodin, Marius DeZayas, Francis Picabia, and other modernist artists, Stieglitz realized that a portrait need not capture a subject’s face but could allude to their character by portraying other elements of their body, or even abstract attributes. This was an idea he explored further in his portraits of O’Keeffe and others made from 1918 through the early 1920s.

After his death in 1946, his widow, O’Keeffe, assembled the foremost collection of his photographs and donated it to the National Gallery in 1949 and 1980. Numbering more than 1,600 pictures, the Key Set includes one print of every mounted photograph in Stieglitz’s possession at the time of his death. If there were different kinds of prints made from the same negative—platinum, palladium, gelatin silver, photogravure, or carbon—or different croppings, O’Keeffe put the finest examples of each into the Key Set.

The Key Set is an exceptional and unrivaled collection of Stieglitz’s art, but he did not always save a print of every photograph he made. In a few rare instances, important pictures have emerged that were not represented in the National Gallery’s collection, such as Untitled (Helen Kastor Fleischmann).

The daughter of Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia, Israeli artist Orit Hofshi (b. 1959) has gained increasing attention in recent years for her compelling, monumental works combining woodcut printing, drawing, and at times incorporating the carved woodblocks themselves. The history and founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts with Palestine have informed her evocative, often desolate landscapes that explore universal themes of migration, displacement, and the toll that human “civilization” has taken on the land. The National Gallery has acquired Time… thou ceaseless lackey to eternity (2018), one of her largest polyptychs. Considered by the artist to be one of her masterworks, this is the first work by Hofshi to enter the National Gallery collection.

Comprised of four panels, this landscape setting is littered with structural remains and rocky outcroppings, navigated by near life-size figures. Implied forces of human and natural destruction as well as evolutionary changes over time coexist in this haunting vista that alludes to the romantic sublime, underscored by disquiet in the lack of specificity of location and timeframe. The figures appear as wanderers or vagabonds, relatively calm, even stoic, and somewhat detached from their surroundings, as if taking stock of circumstances along a journey or in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. There is also an autobiographical element to this work: the synagogue in the far-left panel represents a temple that was destroyed in the anti-Semitic rioting in Czechoslovakia where her parents once lived. The self-portrait figure in the foreground confronts the viewer with Hofshi's forceful gaze, compelling us to share in her role as witness to the consequences when we lose sight of our shared humanity and respect for the natural world that sustains us.

The emotional tensions between figures and setting—aimlessness, resignation, resilience, introspection, and expectation—are heightened by Hofshi’s technique that can be described as expressionist, tempered by realist elements. Her vigorously gouged woodcut line lends an urgency to her forms. Her varied approach to transferring ink from the woodblock by printing, rubbing, and offsetting, adding drawn elements, combining, and reusing woodblocks, and delineating interlocking forms by color all play into the sense of alienation and displacement and complex relationships within and between humankind and the natural world. Hofshi writes: “The landscapes are typically proposed as places, occupied and unoccupied, touched, and untouched, rarely fully committed in a specific context. In such dramatic natural contexts, I find an emphasized sense of evolution, time, and struggles, not only as records of natural phenomenon, but also as reflections of human history.”

Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965) is best known as a painter who skillfully combines art history, queer politics, and popular culture into engaging, often fantastical figurative subjects. In 2011 Eisenman set her paints aside to delve into a year completely focused on printmaking, producing over 60 prints in woodcut, lithography, etching, aquatint, and monotype. The National Gallery’s recent acquisition, Beer Garden (2012–2017)—at nearly 4 feet square—stands out as her most monumental print to date and took five years to complete. This is the first work by Eisenman in any medium to enter the collection.

In this work, the artist appears in a distorted self-portrait in a reflection at the bottom of the raised beer stein in the foreground—as both observer and participant among a host of revelers engaged in a range of social interaction and debauched behavior at this popular drinking spot in her Brooklyn neighborhood. The variously caricatured, abstracted, and contorted figures, and wanton atmosphere suggest sources extending from cartoons and comics to French and German late 19th- and early 20th-century depictions of café night life.

Daniel Lind-Ramos (b. 1953) is one of the foremost contemporary artists born and based in Puerto Rico. Raised by a family of artisans and initially trained as painter, he later began to work in assemblage in a way that resonates with the making-do and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora and with everyday life in his hometown, Loíza. The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first work by Lind-Ramos, Figura de Poder (2016–2020).

Figura de Poder suggests multiple figures that represent power (poder), sound, and force, such as a carnival reveler, a protester, a musician, a construction worker or manual laborer, an animal, or an athlete. The sculpture features three horns that evoke a vejigante reveler, a central figure in the Festival de Santiago Apóstol celebrated in the days surrounding the Feast of Saint James on July 25, while the dominant red color is associated with Chango, the deity of iron and war that is linked to Saint Barbara. Strong musical elements are found throughout the work—a tambourine that doubles as a face, buckets that make up the central “body” of the figure, and a maraca held by one of the gloved hands in the center of the sculpture. They refer to carnival traditions, contemporary political protest, and African-derived music as a site of cultural resistance in the Americas. Other objects—the boxing glove and sneaker seen in the back of the sculpture—are in part autobiographical and suggest the ways in which sports figures like Muhammad Ali became powerful Black social and political forces. 

Lind-Ramos creates his assemblages from organic and found materials such as construction tarps, parts of palm tree trunks, and cinder blocks from Loíza, home to a historic Afro–Puerto Rican community and just east of the capital San Juan. His interest in these unconventional objects is also tied to his admiration of arte povera, the contemporary artistic movement that originated in Italy in the 1960s and relied on commonplace materials as a basis for artmaking. Drawing on music, sports, craft, and daily life, Lind-Ramos formed an arresting structure that evokes the indomitable spirit of Afro–Puerto Rican cultural practices and history.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works with themes related to identity, representation, mass media, and popular culture. The National Gallery has acquired his stainless-steel wall sculpture A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection) (2020), which draws a fictional map of an African American continent. It is the first sculpture by this celebrated artist to enter the collection.

Eight feet tall with a mirrored metal surface, A Place to Call Home outlines what appears to be the western hemisphere, but is actually North America nearly connected to Africa instead of South America. Maps, as this substitution implies, have often been used to represent the ideas and stories their makers want to tell rather than the actual topography. This map points to feelings of connection and detachment that many African Americans have toward Africa. As Thomas explains, a “mythical connection to Africa is embedded in your identity, but many people go to Africa looking for home and don’t find it because our roots are so diluted there. They also never felt at home in the U.S., where they were born. I wanted to make a place where African Americans come from.” And in reflecting all viewers, A Place to Call Home also creates opportunities for empathy across cultures.

Sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), is known for her monumental wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. The National Gallery of Art has recently been given Untitled (c. 1975), the first major relief by Nevelson to enter the collection, from Arne and Milly Glimcher, dedicated supporters of the artist.

A late work, Untitled resembles Nevelson’s classic, earlier work in that it consists largely of found pieces of black-painted wood that fit tightly within boxlike containers. Here, Nevelson incorporated large forms and open rhythms that contrast deliberately with the packed, labyrinthine quality visible in much of her other work. Her unique process transformed everyday materials into compositions that transcended space and altered the viewer’s perception. Dramatic rooms of monochromatic works placed on the floor and walls, and occasionally suspended from the ceiling, allowed the viewer to journey through Nevelson’s created worlds.

Born in Pereiaslav, in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), Nevelson came to the United States in 1905 as part of a wave of Jewish emigration, settling with her family first in Maine, then moving to New York City in 1920, where she studied drama and art. By 1960, Nevelson had established herself firmly within the male-dominated circle of her abstract expressionist peers, and by 1970 she had become an iconic figure known for her sprawling environments and outdoor sculptures as well as her dramatic self-presentation. She received numerous recognitions and awards throughout her lifetime, as well as two significant commissions—the “Louise Nevelson Plaza” in Lower Manhattan and the “Nevelson Chapel” of the Good Shepherd at St. Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan.

A pioneer of second-wave feminist and post­war Black nationalist aesthetics, Betye Saar’s (b. 1926) practice examines African American identity, spirituality, and cross-cultural connectedness. The Trickster (1994), recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, reflects Saar’s continued introspection, her assertion of the aesthetic and conceptual power of African cultural forms, and the belief that art can be made from anything. This is her first assemblage to enter the National Gallery’s collection where it joins one print and two mixed media works by her.

Made from a seven-foot-tall antique heater adorned with a necklace of bells, chains, and vintage keys, The Trickster depicts Eshu, the trickster god of the Yoruba people that protects devotees while engaging in mischief. Saar has represented the trickster figure throughout her career, beginning in the early 1970s with hanging leather pieces. This totemic variation represents not only the enduring significance of the figure for Saar, but also demonstrates her command of her materials on a monumental scale.

Since 1969 Saar has produced potent, evocative assemblage sculptures that explore themes of race, gender, ancestry, and spirituality. Her work is part of a storied tradition of artists working with found objects in Southern California and aligned with multiple art historical movements, including Black Arts, feminist art, and Neo-Dada, while remaining a reflection of her personal history and singular view. Saar’s assemblage practice began with the reappropriation of racist memorabilia she encountered at flea markets and yard sales, turning hurtful imagery into symbols of empowerment, most notably in the assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). The collections of African and Oceanic art at the Field Museum in Chicago later sparked her interest in ancestral arts, ritual objects, and spiritual power. Saar’s symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the various cultural, political, and technological contexts in which it exists.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired Eko Skyscraper (2019) by Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983), the first work by this celebrated artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection.

Eko Skyscraper depicts a young Yoruba woman in front of a lush natural backdrop. The painting’s title holds keys to understanding the work, and the manner of its making: “Eko” refers to Lagos, the Nigerian city where the artist attended middle school, while “skyscraper” alludes to the figure’s threaded, structured hair style featured in a 1967 photograph taken in Kisangani, Congo, by Eliot Elis­­ofon, a documentary photographer. In the painting, Akunyili Crosby reversed the image in Elisofon’s photograph, amplified the sitter’s outward gaze, added a new backdrop, and rendered the picture in warm gradients of orange. Unlike traditional portraits or documentary photographs where subjects pose or are recorded live, Akunyili Crosby builds her imagery at a remove across place and time. In addition to various archives, the artist sources the images for her African and African diasporic subjects from a mix of her own photographs, magazines, and online resources, all of which combine to reflect the experience and consciousness of an artist who emigrated to the United States from her native Nigeria.

David C. Driskell (1931–2020) was an accomplished artist, celebrated curator, and one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of African American art. The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first painting by Driskell, Current Forms: Yoruba Circle (1969), which was inspired by the West African aesthetic and religious traditions that Driskell immersed himself in during travels to Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Nigeria beginning in 1969.

Current Forms: Yoruba Circle features the symbol of Shango, the orisha (deity) of fire, thunder, and justice. Shango was revered among communities of enslaved people in the Caribbean and the Americas and is still venerated by many from across the African Diaspora. In this painting, Shango’s circular head dominates the canvas, while the figure’s lower half contains calligraphic swirls and shapes evocative of Yoruba masks and motifs. Vibrant fields of pinks and blues frame and segment the figure of Shango, and the surface is animated by active strokes and splashes of purple, orange, and blue paint. Driskell merges color field and action painting with West African symbolism in a bold, compelling image that exemplifies his signature style.

Driskell had deep ties to the Washington, DC, area. He received his BA in art from Howard University in 1955 and an MFA from the Catholic University of America in 1962. He taught and chaired the art department at Howard University (1962–1966) and the department of art at the University of Maryland, College Park (1976­­–1998), which established the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora in 2001.

Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Umlazi, South Africa) is a celebrated self-described visual activist who has in the last two decades documented Black gay, lesbian, transgender, and intersex people in South Africa. The National Gallery of Art has acquired Muholi’s Ntozakhe II, (Parktown) (2016) from the series titled Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2012–present), in which the artist (who uses the pronouns they and their) turns the camera on themself to reclaim their blackness.

Drawing on the conventions of traditional portraits, fashion photographs, and ethnographic images, Muholi in Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness adorns themself with a variety of everyday objects—clothespins, scrubbing pads, latex gloves—to allude to their personal past, South Africa’s fraught history, and urgent global concerns, as well as sexual politics and cultural violence. By digitally darkening their skin and brightening the whites of their eyes, Muholi intensifies their own blackness to make these pictures call into question notions of beauty and pride. “I wanted to use my face so that people will always remember just how important our Black faces are, when confronted by them.” Echoing the words of the celebrated African American photographer Gordon Parks, Muholi asserts that they want to “teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves, to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” Muholi further intensifies the confrontational nature of their photographs by making very large prints, often more than 11 feet high.

Ntozakhe II, (Parktown) is a powerful self-portrait in which the artist employs their body to confront “the politics of race and pigment.” The artist posed in a loose-fitting toga-like garment with a crown of hair donuts. Those props, along with the slight tilt of the chin, upturned gaze, and elongated neck, make Muholi look like the Statue of Liberty. Noting that the statue is green, Muholi wondered why it could not also be Black: “In some ways, yes, Ntozakhe is based on the Statue of Liberty, representing the idea of freedom—the freedom all women should have—as well as pride: pride in who we are as Black, female-bodied beings. But what kind of freedom are we talking about? What is the color of the Statue of Liberty? What race is the figure monumentalized as Lady Liberty?”