Last weekend, at dinners hosted by some of Los Angeles’ top art collectors and a gala auction, members of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Collectors Committee (Lacma) raised over $2 million for the museum’s acquisition budget and acquired ten works for its permanent collection. Since the Museum’s Collectors’ Committee Weekend was launched in 1986, it has raised more than $49 million for the museum and resulted in the acquisition of 256 works.
Acquisition events this weekend saw the museum add objects spanning the 11th to 21st centuries. The oldest object joining the Lacma collection is an architectural fragment, the capital of a column believed to belong to a fortified palace that once stood on the current site of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. It joins several other artifacts from Islamic Spain in the museum’s collection.
Unidentified Artists, Cabinet (Papelera), last quarter of the 17th century, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of the Collectors Committee 2023 © Museum Associates/ Lacma
A very different historical object of Spanish provenance entering the museum’s collection is an ornate blackened wood cabinet that was made in Antwerp for Melchor Portocarrero y Lasso de la Vega, who served as Viceroy of Peru at the turn of the 18th century. . While serving in Lima, he had the cabinet adorned with Peruvian silver, literally incorporating the spoils of Spain’s extractive colonial activities in the Americas into the object.
The museum is also acquiring five historic Pacific Island textiles made with bark cloth derived from the inner bark of paper mulberry trees. Among them is a kapa moe (bedspread) that belonged to Hawaiian Queen Ka’ahumanu (1768-1832), one of the most powerful women in the history of the islands. Other acquired bark textiles come from the islands of Niue, Futuna and Samoa.
Miyoko Itō, sea chest1972, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Collectors Committee Gift 2023 © Estate of Miyoko Ito, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Also among the acquisitions are three works by contemporary Chicago artists: Nick Cave, Theater doors and Miyoko Ito. sea chest (1972), a typically allusive abstract painting by Ito (1918-1983), features his characteristic geometric shapes and distinctive palette of warm reds and cool blues. Born in Berkeley, California, Ito and her husband were among more than 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in camps across the American West after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942. She spent the rest of her life in Chicago and has become the subject of much posthumous interest and attention in recent years.
The museum also acquired the powerful Sound combination 8:46 (2022), from his famous series of intricate and wearable sculptures. Created in response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd, its title refers to the period when police officer Derek Chauvin was originally said to have been kneeling on Floyd’s neck (it was later revealed that it was actually nine and a half minutes). Befitting the subject matter, the artwork features Cave’s typically bright and shiny elements overlaid with black flowers. It is not only Cave’s first work to enter the Lacma collection but also, according to the museum, his first piece acquired by a Los Angeles museum.
Nick Cave, Sound combination 8:462021, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of the 2023 Collectors Committee with additional funds provided by the Buddy Taub Foundation © Nick Cave, photo courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Lacma also added Gates’ ceramic and wood sculpture Ship #12 (2020), which references both traditional pottery from Tokoname, Japan, and 19th-century black ceramicist David Drake, whose work features prominently in the exhibitionHear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolinacurrently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Among the works acquired are also a late 17th century still life by Spanish artist Bernardo Polo and the grim cityscape painting by Max Ernst, The whole town (1935).
“The Collectors Committee is a critical source of support for Lacma’s collection and has enabled transformative acquisitions across all curatorial areas of the museum,” Lacma director Michael Govan said in a statement.
The museum is in the midst of a huge and controversial $750 million construction project, which will see part of its permanent collection on display in a building designed by Peter Zumthor on Wilshire Boulevard. Construction of the new building is expected to be completed by the end of 2024.
