The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) will welcome 12 new works into its permanent collection at no cost thanks to an acquisition fund that allows the museum to select work from dealers taking part in the Dallas Art Fair.
The doors of the fair opened one day early on Wednesday (19 April) to DMA curators and donors of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, which funds the annual acquisition gift. Since it started in 2016, the programme has raised $775,000 and funded the placement of 55 pieces in the museum’s permanent collection.
Riley Holloway’s Records on Repeat (2023) Courtesy the artist and Erin Cluley Gallery
This year, the museum had $100,000 to spend and picked up a dozen works, a new record haul according to Katherine Brodbeck, the senior curator of contemporary art at the DMA. The new acquisitions will help bolster the representation within the museum's collection of work by artists from the Asian, Latin America and African diasporas, she said.
The DMA also likes to support Dallas artists and galleries with the gift, Brodbeck says. This year, the museum acquired work by two Dallas-based artists represented by local galleries: four works on paper mounted onto fabric by Nishiki Sugawara-Beda from Cris Worley Fine Arts, and Riley Holloway’s Records on Repeat (2023) from Erin Cluley Gallery. The museum also selected Masamitsu Shigeta’s Interior Flower (2023) from Dallas art gallery 12.26.
Works acquired by the museum with through the fund this year also include True Westerners for One Strange Hour (2023) by Yowshien Kuo, an artist based in St Louis, Missouri, from Turin-based Luce Gallery; Yifan Jiang’s Pelican (2022) from Los Angeles gallery Meliksetian Briggs; Portrait Vignette: Healing (2022) by Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, a Mongolian artist, from Sapar Contemporary in New York; Out in the Open (2023) by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber from Toronto gallery Patel Brown; Karla Diaz’s watercolour painting Torera (bullfighter) (2023) from Luis de Jesus Los Angeles; and Self-Pollinating Androgyne Dreamscile Covers the World in Yes(es) and Possibilities (2023) by Chelsea Culprit from Morán Morán, a gallery in Los Angeles.
Masamitsu Shigeta’s Interior Flower (2023) Courtesy the artist and 12.26
Brodbeck said the newly acquired works will be put on display on a rolling basis as they fit into the museum’s running program of temporary exhibitions. The 2023 Dallas Art Fair continues at the Fashion Industry Gallery until 23 April.
Such acquisition funds are increasingly common at fairs across the US around the world. Last week at Expo Chicago, institutions including the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, Florida, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the DePaul Art Museum acquired works from the fair.