April Issue 2001
North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, Announces Seven Important Acquisitions
The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, recently approved the acquisition of its first video installation, Bill Violas Quintet of Remembrance, along with two masquerade headdresses from Cameroon, a Ghanaian textile, two illustrations by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas and a new work by post-modernist painter David Salle. The acquisition of the seven works, approved by the North Carolina Museum of Art's Board of Trustees Mar. 14, 2001, is a significant move toward enhancing the Museum's collection of African art and modern and contemporary art.
"Each of these recent acquisitions addresses important areas of our collection," said John W. Coffey, associate director for collections. "We are expanding the range of media exhibited in the Museum with Bill Viola's video installation. We are enhancing our collection of contemporary American painting with "The Emperor" by David Salle, one of the major artists to emerge out of the 1980s. We're adding to our permanent collection of African-American art with a pair of paintings in gouache by Aaron Douglas. And our African art collection boasts not just one but three impressive new additions."
Recognized as one of the pioneers of video art, Bill Viola uses advanced media technology to create poetic explorations of perception and time. He often generates dreamlike dramas out of ordinary activities by presenting them in extreme slow motion. Quintet of Remembrance (2000) utilizes this technique. Ideally shown as a large-scale rear projection, Quintet depicts a group of five people, each reacting in an intensely personal manner to an unseen, unspecified event. Indicative of Viola's interest in art history, Quintet was inspired by European religious painting, in particular the figures who stand witness to dramatic events such as the Crucifixion, their gestures and faces communicating a range of individual responses including awe, fear, grief and resignation. The installation will make its public debut in a major exhibition of contemporary film and video, scheduled to open at the Museum in early 2002.
David Salle first achieved critical and popular success in the 1980s, along with a group of other important young painters including Julian Schnabel, Robert Longo and Ross Bleckner. Alone among this group, Salle has maintained a strong allegiance to painting, and earlier this year he presented the "Pastoral" series during an exhibition at New York's Gagosian Gallery. Each of the large-scale paintings began as an image derived from 18th-century European painting: a country scene with a young fisherman and a peasant girl. The artist then overlaid this image with a wild assortment of related and wholly unrelated images from art history and pop culture. The Emperor (2000), perhaps the finest work in the new series, includes two coffin shapes, suggesting perhaps that all is not ideal in this "pastoral" world; a headless harlequin; a spectral face; and, adjacent to the scene, a platter of fish and a draped cloth. This curious and puzzling painting is already on view in the Museum's Modern and Contemporary Galleries.
Three of Aaron Douglas' illustrations for Paul Morand's 1929 book Black Magic have been on extended loan to the Museum since 1998. Two of these, Congo and The Black Tsar, have now been donated to the Museum by Susie R. Powell and Franklin R. Anderson of Durham, NC. One of the foremost painters in the African-American cultural revival known as the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas was commissioned to illustrate Morand's book of fictional sketches about travels in "28 Negro countries." Though Douglas' illustrations emphasized the "primitivism" of traditional black cultures as expressed in ecstatic dance, music and ritual, the images themselves are sophisticated in their expression of African and African-American themes in a forceful, modernist style.
Two 20th-century masquerade headdresses from Cameroon will be installed in May in the Museum's African Gallery, one a gift of Drs. Noble and Jean Endicott of New York, and a second acquired with funds provided by Richard and Kathy Bruch of Durham, NC. In Cameroon, masks and masquerades are associated with a variety of men's societies, most of which are linked to the royal household. These headdresses, from the Bamileke region of the Cameroon Grassfields, are worn for an annual public dance ceremony performed by the Kuosi society. The first of the new headdresses is fashioned of cloth over a basketry framework and decorated with imported glass beads. The second features a basketry framework covered in black cloth and decorated with orange-red tail feathers from the African gray parrot. The two headdresses will be displayed alongside a Bamileke beaded elephant mask on a three-year loan from the Field Museum in Chicago.
A final acquisition for the African Gallery is a man's double-weave cloth woven by the workshop of Samuel Cophie. In Ghana's Asante Kingdom, Cophie is famous for his unusual and innovative designs, and prominent chiefs commission unique garments from him for important festivals and ceremonies. The cloth entering the Museum's African collection reproduces a design created by Cophie for Chief Osayem Tetteh Odorkor Tuumeh. Commissioned in July 2000, this cloth is the last of a group of 10 Ghanaian textiles donated by the NCMA Docents, who gave eight kente cloths and one Asafo flag to the Museum in Fall 2000.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call the museum at 919/839-6262 or visit the
NCMA's web site at (http://www.ncartmuseum.org).
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