Seven Museums Acquire Work by Gallery Wendi Norris Artists
Please join Gallery Wendi Norris in congratulating Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Arizona State University Art Museum, Chapman University, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection on their recent acquisitions of our artists’ work.
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art has acquired In Between the News (2019) by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Selected by members of the Carter’s Paper Forum during the museum’s annual View and Vote event, In Between the News addresses the major themes of Campos-Pons’ work: memory, gender, religion, and identity formation.
Arizona State University Art Museum has added Broken Line (2018), a neon sculpture of the US/Mexico border, by Julio César Morales to their collection. Growing up in Tijuana, Morales has long investigated issues on and around the US/Mexico border through a variety of media. ASU’s art museum harnesses the university’s breadth and depth of expertise to pioneer new models for arts learning, engagement, and innovation.
The Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University has acquired collage-based works by both Ambreen Butt and Ranu Mukherjee. Butt explores the relationship between power and vulnerability and pays homage to innocent lives lost in her collage based work, Sultanat Khan (16) (2020). Mukherjee’s lair (for Martha and friends) (2022) addresses the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has procured Juggler (1946), a wire marionette by Alice Rahon, articulated for her cosmic ballet, Ballet of Orion. Juggler was exhibited at LACMA in the 2012 exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States and in the 2022 Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams. Gallery Wendi Norris is thrilled for the sculpture to be back at LACMA, the largest art museum in the western United States, as part of their permanent collection.
The Museum of Modern Art has acquired an enigmatic gouache by Remedios Varo. Painted during a transitional period in the artist’s life and career, La torre (1947) acts as a bridge between Varo’s European upbringing and her new situation as an émigré in Mexico City. It is also a bridge between her early work steeped in Surrealism and her later work using a miniaturist painting technique. Founded in 1929, the MoMA collection constitutes one of the most comprehensive and panoramic views into modern art, boasting approximately 200,000 artworks across all media.
The Princeton University Art Museum has acquired María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Secrets of the Magnolia Tree. Deb Luminosity (2022). Presented as three vertical fragments rooted into the ground and towering up ten feet, Deb Luminosity is the second artwork in the artist’s seven part series, Secrets of the Magnolia Tree. Princeton’s art museum seeks to bring the visual arts to the heart of the university experience for students, scholars, and visitors as one of the world’s greatest comprehensive museums in an academic setting.
The Sharjah Art Foundation Collection has also procured a work by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Created as part of a multi-media installation for Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Liminal Circularity (Portrait #3) (2023), continues the artist’s life-long interest in the history of African Diaspora through retellings of familial stories. Seeded with acquisitions and commissions from the Sharjah Biennial and Foundation, the Collection has since grown to be one of the Middle East’s pre-eminent art collections, serving to enrich the lives of audiences through the acquisition and exhibition of significant works of modern and contemporary art, locally and internationally.