Dallas Museum of Art acquires 12 works at Dallas Art Fair with annual donation

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) will welcome 12 new works to its permanent collection free of charge thanks to an acquisition fund that allows the museum to select works from participating dealers in the Dallas Art Fair.

The doors to the fair opened a day earlier on Wednesday (April 19) to DMA curators and donors to the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, which funds the annual acquisition donation. Since its launch in 2016, the program has raised $775,000 and funded the placement of 55 pieces in the museum’s permanent collection.

This year the museum had $100,000 to spend and picked up a dozen works, a new record according to Katherine Brodbeck, senior curator of contemporary art at the DMA. The new acquisitions will help strengthen the representation within the museum’s collection of works by artists from the Asian, Latin American and African diasporas, she said.

DMA also likes support Dallas artists and galleries with the gift, Brodbeck said. This year, the museum acquired works by two Dallas artists represented by local galleries: four works on paper mounted on fabric by Nishiki Sugawara-Beda of Cris Worley Fine Arts, and Riley Holloway’s Repeated recordings (2023) from the Erin Cluley Gallery. The museum has also selected the works of Masamitsu Shigeta indoor flower (2023) from Dallas Art Gallery 12.26.

Works acquired by the museum through the fund this year also include Real westerners for a weird hour (2023) by Yowshien Kuo, an artist based in St Louis, Missouri, from Luce Gallery in Turin; Yifan Jiang’s Pelican (2022) from Los Angeles gallery Meliksetian Briggs; Portrait Thumbnail: Healing (2022) by Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, a Mongolian artist, from Sapar Contemporary in New York; Outdoors (2023) by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber of Toronto’s Patel Brown Gallery; Karla Diaz’s watercolor Torera (torero) (2023) by Luis de Jesus Los Angeles; And Self-Pollinating Androgyne Dreamscile Covers the World in Yes(s) and Possibilities (2023) by Chelsea Culprit from Morán Morán, a gallery in Los Angeles.

Brodbeck said the newly acquired works will be exhibited as they fit into the museum’s program of temporary exhibitions. The 2023 Dallas Art Fair continues at the Fashion Industry Gallery until April 23.