Recent Acquisition Highlights

In 80 years of its existence the National Gallery of Art has amassed one of the world’s most significant collections of American and European masterworks of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and photographs. Beginning with a selection of 126 paintings and 26 sculptures given by the National Gallery’s founder Andrew W. Mellon, the collection has grown to more than 145,000 works today.

The National Gallery’s treasures come from many diverse times and places of origin and each work of art in the permanent collection is a private donation, acquired either directly or with contributed funds. Listed below are some of the most important recent additions to the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art.

Three Works by Zarina

The National Gallery has acquired three works by Zarina (active internationally, 1937–2020), one of the most celebrated South Asian artists of the past century. Although printmaking was her primary medium, her interest in materials extended to the inventive manipulation of paper alone, as well as projects in metal, terracotta, and stone. Ideas concerning displacement, mobility, loss, and memory are found throughout Zarina’s work, as she explored her rootless existence and the fraught politics of migration and cultural dominance in the various locations where she lived. These are the first works by Zarina to enter the National Gallery’s collections and represent the range of her artistic practice.

The concept of home is a recurring theme in Zarina’s work. One of her seminal print projects, Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines (1997) features various floor plans of the many places she resided over the course of her itinerant life. The linear structure of the compositions is offset by subtle ink washes and textural effects that hint at the presence of inhabitants of these dwellings, suggesting scuff marks on floors and other signs of wear. Corners (1980) is a superb example of Zarina’s cast paper reliefs. Recalling the facade of a nondescript, brutalist style of urban apartment buildings with repeating rows of recessed rectilinear windows, this relief exemplifies both her minimalist sensibility as well as her interest in architecture. The empty, recessed areas of the relief may also be seen as an allusion to displacement. The prominent woodgrain pattern in the untitled print from 1968 demonstrates Zarina’s love of the inherent textures of her materials, interest in neutral and natural color palettes, and alludes to the woodblock prints that first inspired her to take up printmaking.

Orit Hofshi, Time...thou ceaseless lackey to eternity

Nicole Eisenman, Beer Garden

Daniel Lind-Ramos, Figura de Poder

Hank Willis Thomas, A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection)

Louise Nevelson, Untitled

Virginia Dwan Gift of Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, Edward Kienholz, and Charles Ross

One of the most important art dealers of the late 20th century, Virginia Dwan (b. 1931) presented seminal exhibitions of such movements as pop art, nouveau réalisme, minimal art, conceptual art, and land art during the storied 11-year run of her galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Dwan’s most recent gifts to the National Gallery from her personal collection include a major painting by Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), two collages by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), and sculptures by Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), Edward Kienholz (1927–1994), and Charles Ross (b. 1937). They join Dwan’s numerous other gifts as part of a promised donation of some 250 works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, films, and artists’ books. Many of these works were featured in the 2016–2017 National Gallery exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971, which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2017.

The focus of two solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles Dwan Gallery in 1961 and 1963, Reinhardt was also included in the minimalist group show Ten at the New York gallery in 1966. The black square of Reinhardt’s Ultimate Painting (1963) was the artist’s preferred shape for his late works and his most iconic format.

Rauschenberg made Maquette for Robert Rauschenberg Exhibition at Dwan Gallery (1962) in advance of his show at the Los Angeles Dwan Gallery in 1962. Containing a crossword puzzle revealing the gallery’s address and the show’s opening date, a Western Union envelope and telegram addressed to the artist, and transfer drawings rubbed onto the paper sheet, the collage served as the exhibition announcement. A second work, Untitled—(For Virginia with Hook) (1965), is built up from torn fragments of printed and colored papers that the artist glued and stapled to a paper support. Pressed behind Plexiglas, the arrangement is held together by screws and grommets and is meant to be hung from a metal hook. This gift brings two valuable collages produced at the height of Rauschenberg’s career to the nation’s collection.

Tinguely’s Odessa (1963) was included in Dwan’s 1963 exhibition of the Swiss artist’s mechanical sculptures. Composed of three rotating wheel hubs bound to one another by their original rubber straps, the sculpture is activated by an electric foot pedal. A superb example of kinetic art, Odessa is the first sculpture by Tinguely to enter the National Gallery collection.

Kienholz’s assemblage Portrait of Virginia (1963) combines fragments of an old table, a discarded box, scraps of metal, and other elements to evoke Dwan. A crystal vase turned upside-down serves as her head. While the National Gallery owns several of Kienholz’s editioned works produced at Gemini G.E.L. in collaboration with Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Portrait of Virginia is the museum’s first unique assemblage, the medium for which the artist is best known.

Ross’s Collapsing Cube (1966) is the second sculpture by the artist to enter the collection, joining Hanging Islands (1966/2015) given by Dwan in 2016. The five Plexiglas elements are arranged side by side to narrate the “collapse” of a cube into progressively more complex polygons. The emblematic geometric form, the cube, becomes increasingly difficult to perceive.

Heather Podesta Gift of Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, and Frank Thiel

A prominent collector of contemporary art, Heather Podesta has made important contributions to the collection of the National Gallery of Art over the years. Her most recent donation of outstanding photographs by Thomas Demand (b. 1964), Vik Muniz (b. 1961), and Frank Thiel (b. 1966) significantly deepens the museum’s holdings of photographs by these prolific artists.

Demand’s provocative photograph Junior Suite (2012) comments on the irreverent nature of tabloid photography and immense public interest in celebrity tragedy. Responding to the media frenzy surrounding the death of Whitney Houston in 2012, Demand was shocked by the publication of one picture that depicted the room service table where Houston had been eating moments before she died. Demand recreated the scene using colored paper, then photographed the highly crafted fabrication before destroying it. Junior Suite disrupts the illusion of intimacy created by the tabloid image, often referred to as Houston’s “last supper,” and instead reveals the morbid invasion of privacy it signifies.

Muniz’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Ashes (1999) comments on Casper David Friedrich’s iconic 1818 painting of a man reflecting on a sublime wilderness. Muniz updates the 19th-century rendering, where a mysterious fog both obscures and reveals the landscape, to a contemporary one constructed entirely from ash and discarded cigarette butts. The conceptual difference between Friedrich’s highly recognizable romantic image and the detritus of Muniz’s Wanderer creates a fascinating dialogue about individual experience, health, and the environment.

Thiel has photographed the transformation of a reunified Berlin for over two decades. His large-scale color print Stadt 10/06A (Berlin) (2001) documents a city reborn after the tumultuous events of the 20th century and reveals an unfolding architectural history through the creation of new patterns of urban existence. Thiel is also interested in the overwhelming power of glacial configurations. His monumental photograph Perito Moreno #11 (2012–2013), depicting Patagonia’s Perito Moreno Glacier, is a haunting meditation on the strength and majesty, and fragility and endangerment, of the natural world.

Four Works from Melvin Edward ’s Lynch Fragments Series Acquired

Recognized as a pioneer in the history of contemporary American sculpture, Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) draws inspiration from African metalworking traditions, American racial histories, and visual languages of modernism, as well as from his own personal experiences and relationships. The National Gallery of Art has acquired four works from Lynch Fragments, Edwards’s most extensive and celebrated series that responds to legacies of race, labor, and oppression.

Originally inspired by police killings of Black citizens and other forms of brutality during the civil rights era, Edwards’s Lynch Fragments are modestly sized wall reliefs made from found metal objects, such as chains, locks, knives, tool parts, and other detritus that the artist welded together into abstract forms. The series has three distinct periods: the early 1960s that depicted Edwards’s response to racial violence in the United States; his activism in the wake of the Vietnam War during the early 1970s; and from 1978 to the present, when he began to pay homage to significant individuals in his life—usually friends, collaborators, and personal heroes—and to explore ideas of nostalgia and investigate African culture.

The twisted steel and chain of All Most (1985) recall histories of labor and slavery as the work simultaneously evokes Edwards’s own past in both rural and industrialized contexts in the South. A large trowel juts out from Tayali Ever Ready (1981–1986/1988) to pay tribute to Zambia’s first modern sculptor, Henry Tayali. Siempre Gilberto de la Nuez (1994) honors the Cuban painter and friend of Edwards with chains, blades, and a cross formed by two threaded rods. For Emilio Cruz (2005) similarly is a memorial to a friend and artist as well as an example of the Discs, a major development in the Lynch Fragment series, in which Edwards adheres welded compositions to the center of metal circles. 

Born in Houston, Texas, Edwards began his artistic career at USC, where he met and was mentored by the Hungarian painter Francis de Erdely. In 1965 the Santa Barbara Museum of Art organized his first solo exhibition, which launched his professional career. Edwards moved to New York City in 1967. Shortly after his arrival, his work was exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1970 he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Edwards is represented also by two works on paper in the National Gallery’s collection.

Betye Saar, The Trickster

Carmen Herrera, Untitled and Untitled Estructura (Yellow)

Carmen Herrera (1915–2022, Havana) was one of the leading practitioners of abstract art who emerged during the second half of the 20th century. Largely ignored for most of her life, Herrera is now widely recognized. Associated with non-representational, concrete abstraction in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Herrera’s art contributed to the cross-pollination of modernist ideas. Combining crisp contours with contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera’s works create movement, rhythm, and spatial tension across their surfaces. The National Gallery of Art has just acquired Herrera’s painting Untitled (2013) and her sculptural relief Untitled Estructura (Yellow) (1966/2016). The works are the first by the artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection.

“The National Gallery is honored to acquire two works by the renowned abstract artist Carmen Herrera, including Untitled, among the last of her signature green-and-white paintings, and one of her painted sculptures known as Estructuras (Structures),” said James Meyer, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art. “We are particularly grateful to have acquired these works before Herrera's passing. The acquisition gave the artist great satisfaction late in her extraordinary career.”

Untitled, in Herrera’s distinctive green-and-white color palette, recalls her series Blanco y Verde (1959–1971), 15 earlier works that combine rectangular supports with triangular shapes in these hues. Painting works in green and white is “like saying yes and no,” Herrera once said. This combination of value and color creates intense visual effects that challenge the viewer’s perception: in Untitled, space appears both illusionistic and flat, receding and coming forward simultaneously. Herrera made Untitled at the age of 98, and it was the last green-and-white work in her possession.  

Untitled Estructura (Yellow) is one of several sculptural structures that Herrera conceived during the mid-1960s. It consists of two identical, triangular wedges hung opposite each other, with a narrow slice of wall visible between the inverted forms. The Estructuras allowed Herrera to push the boundaries of painting as a medium by painting the frames and edges of her canvases—a feature integral to the viewer’s perception of the work. Lacking the resources to produce sculpture, Herrera instead began making wall reliefs in painted wood in 1971. Owing to her success later in life, she was able to realize the Estructuras in wood and, eventually, painted aluminum.

The youngest of several children of a newspaper editor and journalist, Herrera studied architecture and art at the Universidad de La Habana before moving to New York in 1939 with her American-born husband, Jesse Loewenthal. In New York, Herrera developed her artistic skills at the Art Students League and in the studios of painters Samuel Brecher and Jon Corbino. In 1948 the couple moved to Paris, where Herrera encountered many of the leading artists and writers of the period and emerged as an abstract painter, exhibiting her work at the prestigious Salon des Réalités Nouvelles annually until 1953.

Returning to New York in 1954, Herrera worked continuously over the next several decades, refining and simplifying the formats of her painting. In contrast to contemporaries such as Ellsworth Kelly and Leon Polk Smith, Herrera, a woman of Cuban background, was unable to sell her work. She was offered her first retrospective at New York’s Alternative Museum in 1985. The turning point of her career came in 2004–2005, when her work was featured in well-received shows at Latincollector in New York and her painting Untitled (1952) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective exhibition, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, was held during her centenary at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eko Skyscraper

David C. Driskell, Current Forms: Yoruba Circle

Zanele Muholi, Ntozakhe II, (Parktown)

James Luna, The Artifact Piece (1987/1990) and Take A Picture with a Real Indian (1991/2001/2010)

One of the best-known Native American artists, James Luna (Luiseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican, 1950–2018) used his body in performances, installations, and photographs to question the fetishization, museological display, and commodification of Native Americans. The National Gallery of Art has acquired two of Luna’s historic multipart works: The Artifact Piece (1987/1990) and Take a Picture with a Real Indian (1991/2001/2010). These are significant additions to the permanent collection by this influential Native American artist.

The Artifact Piece (1987/1990) was first presented at the San Diego Museum of Man and later at the Studio Museum in Harlem as part of the landmark Decade Show. The work comprises two vitrines, one with text panels perched on a bed of sand where Luna originally lay for short intervals wearing a breechcloth, and the other filled with some of Luna’s personal effects, including his college diploma, favorite music, and family photos. The Artifact Piece resonated broadly in the 1980s and has grown in influence among artists and scholars ever since. In 2020 the Luna Estate collaborated with the Garth Greenan Gallery to plan for the posthumous presentation of The Artifact Piece, in which a surrogate will leave an impression in the sand, signaling the absence of the artist.

Take a Picture with a Real Indian (1991/2001/2010) was first presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1991 and later reprised in 2001 in Salina, Kansas, and in 2010 on Columbus Day (now Indigenous Peoples’ Day) outside Washington, DC’s Union Station. It is Luna’s most interactive work, in which individuals originally posed with Luna himself or with three life-size cutouts of the artist, two wearing varieties of traditional Native dress and the third in chinos and a polo shirt. In keeping with the Luna Estate’s wishes, the “standees” will represent the artist posthumously in future installations. When someone interacts with this work, two Polaroid photographs are taken: one for the participant to take home and one that remains with the work as a record of the performance. Luna found he attracted more participants while in Native dress than in street clothes, demonstrating the popularity of stereotypical Native American identity and its construct as a tourist attraction.