In the latest news regarding acquisition of famous works, Baltimore Museum of Art has made some major progress. The famous museum has acquired more than 70 works by famous artists including Charles Gaines, Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, and Ana Mendieta including others.
The purchase of 17 of these works was made by the profits museum made from seven works that they recently deaccessioned. These works were sold because the museum states its desire to diversify the holdings. Among these 70+ works are famous pieces such as Gaines’s mixed media Number and Tress, Tiergarden Series 3 from 2018. These includes photographs and diagram from trees of Berlin’s Tiergarden park
Along with that, Anna Mendieta’s film Blood Inside Outside which is also the first work by Anna to have entered the BMA’s collection as well as prints by Geta Brătescu; and André Derain’s painting Paysage de Provence are included in the works acquired by Baltimore Museum of Art.
The museum also added works from artists such as Ebony G. Patterson, Manuel Orazi, Édouard Vuillard, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Elle Pérez, Wilmer Wilson IV as well as others. Talking about the works that were deaccessioned by the Museum, they were sold at Sotheby’s in New York last year in May.
Among these were the A Warhol “Oxidation Painting” going for $3.4 million along with a Franz Kline abstraction which got sold for $5.2 million. These were the most expensive items in the group. However, some believe that selling of these works was a controversial choice as they were by white men. An opinion editorial from Baltimore Sun claimed it to be a “horrendous decision”
Director of BMA, Christopher Bedford, on the topic of new acquisitions said that:
“These historic and contemporary works create new opportunities to tell important and relevant narratives about the development of art and culture, and represent our collective goal to capture the innovations of a broad spectrum of artists with a continued and particular emphasis on those that have previously been under-represented in institutional collections.”