BRIAN FORREST, HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES/SAN ANTONIO MUSEUM OF ART, PURCHASED WITH FUNDS FROM THE BROWN FOUNDATION CONTEMPORARY ART ACQUISITION FUND
The San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas has added to its collection works by Kevin Beasley, Rodney McMillian, and Martine Syms. The works by Beasley and McMillian are already currently on view in the museum’s galleries. The work by Syms, a video and sound installation called Laughing Gas (2016), which appeared in the 2016 edition of the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, will go on view in February, to coincide with Black History Month. (All three artists are black.)
Beasley’s piece, If I was standing alone I wouldn’t stand it all (2017), is what the artist calls a “ghost” work, one in which the people it portrays go unseen. Made from dresses dipped in resin, it meditates on loss and the passage of time. McMillian’s Northern Lights: For Uhura (2016), an homage to the Star Trek character Uhura, is one of the artist’s “landscape paintings,” and features blue, brown, and grey paint poured across it.
“Each artwork was made in the last year or two and reflects the most critical ideas and issues motivating artistic practices today,” Suzanne Weaver, the museum’s modern and contemporary art curator, said in a statement. “I am thrilled to add works of such intelligence, imagination, and lasting relevance and meaning.”