Collection news
Author of recent Warwick purchase on show in the White House
The President is keen to increase the diversity of the art on display in the White House. Traditional works from the permanent collection, including the ‘wild frontier’ paintings and Texas landscapes favoured by George Bush, will be replaced by more contemporary works. The presidential living quarters have already been adorned with loans of paintings by Josef Albers, Jasper Johns, and Ed Ruscha among others.
Further loans are being sought to represent black, Hispanic and Asian artists - female as well as male. In addition to Glenn Ligon, African American artists will be represented by Alma Thomas, born in 1891, who became a prominent abstract painter in the 1960s and 1970s and was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition in New York. The Hirshhorn Museum is loaning two works by Thomas and a text-based painting by Ligon, Black Like Me #2.
The move has been applauded in the art world and, according to a representative of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institute has the potential “to transform the bully pulpit into a poetic perch from which to suggest new strategies for broadening the conversation about art and culture in this country”.