The Museum of Modern Art in New York has revealed a complete list of the acquisitions it made over the 2015–16 fiscal year. Some of the museum’s most important new holdings, such as Kerry James Marshall’s 2015 painting Untitled (policeman) and Faith Ringgold’s scorching 1967 work American People Series #20: Die, had already been announced, but as always, the list is a fun one to pick over.
Bruce Conner, Crossroads (promotional still), 1976, black-and-white 35mm film with sound, transferred to video, 37 minutes.
©CONNER FAMILY TRUST/COURTESY CONNER FAMILY TRUST/THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, PURCHASE
Here are some highlights from the acquisitions list, which is available on MoMA’s website as a PDF:
- James Turrell’s Meeting (1986), a site-specific “Skyscape” work that was originally commissioned for MoMA PS1 in 1976, but wasn’t officially added to the museum’s collection until the past year, after the work was renovated.
- Mark Bradford’s 12-foot-long canvas Let’s Walk to the Middle of the Ocean (2015), which was on view in a solo show at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Spiderman(2015), a video work by Bradford, who will be representing the United States at the Venice Biennale this year, was also acquired.
- Chris Ofili’s The Raising of Lazarus (2007), a Matissean oil-and-charcoal painting depicting a biblical scene.
- Peter Jackson’s 2014 film The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, one of the first films to be projected at 60 frames per second.
- Some harder-to-find films: Todd Haynes’s early experiment Dottie Gets Spanked, two documentaries from Laura Poitras’s “9/11 Trilogy,” K8 Hardy’s Outfitumentary, and 32 moving-image works by Robert Frank.
- Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976), a film featuring 37 minutes of slow-motion atomic bomb explosions that recently appeared at the museum’s retrospective for the San Francisco–based artist.
- Twenty-one objects and pieces of documentation related to performances by Simone Forti.
- Nineteen photographs, including a portrait of Patti Smith, by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was the subject of major shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Museum last year.
- A smattering of notable works by younger artists: Kevin Beasley’s fiberglass sculpture Untitled (Sea), 2016, Avery Singer’s Google SketchUp–inspired Anxiety Painting (2014), nine video animations by Jacolby Satterwhite, and and three “live simulations” by Ian Cheng, whose “Emissary” trilogy will be the subject of a MoMA PS1 show in April.