Eight Museums Acquire Works by Gallery Wendi Norris Artists

Please join Gallery Wendi Norris in congratulating eight North American institutions on their recent acquisitions of our artists’ work.

The Toledo Museum of Art has acquired Cazadora de Astros (La luna aprisionada) (1956), by Remedios Varo. A non-profit institution founded in 1901 whose collection is open to the public free of charge, TMA is an example of a museum committed to engaging its communities through acquisitions of work by such long-overlooked modern masters as Remedios Varo. Cazadora de Astros is one of Varo’s most beautiful and iconographically mysterious paintings.

Through Gallery Wendi Norris, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has acquired Diego Rivera’s Niña en azul y blanco (Retrato de Juanita Rosas a los diez años de edad) (1939). This is one of more than seventy portraits of Mexican children that Rivera created over a thirty-year period beginning in 1926, but in size, composition, cultural references, and emotional intensity, Niña en azul y blanco stands apart. Rivera’s painting will join several others by the artist in the Lucas Museum’s collection, which is anchored in visual storytelling as a central function of art and is anticipated to open to the public in 2023.

One of the defining museums of American modern and contemporary art, the Whitney in New York City has added Sultana’s Dream (2018) by Chitra Ganesh to its permanent collection. This portfolio of work was inspired by a 1905 text of the same name by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, an early Bengali feminist author and social reformer. Over the course of twenty-seven linocuts, Ganesh translates the writer’s narrative into a visual grammar, thereby reconnecting early feminist utopian imaginaries to the challenges of twenty-first-century life and providing contemporary visions of a just future.

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, has added María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Butterfly Eyes (For Breonna Taylor) (2021) to its permanent collection. Merging traditional and digital media, this triptych was first exhibited at the Speed as part of its 2021 exhibit “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” a reflection on Breonna’s life, her killing in 2020, and the year of protests that followed. Gallery Wendi Norris congratulates the Speed on its decision to keep this essential work of historical awareness and personal recognition.

Also by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, History of a People who were not Heroes: A Town Portrait (1994) has been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The MFA was founded in 1870 and opened its doors to the public on July 4th, 1876, on the occasion of the United States’ centennial. With nearly 500,000 works of art in its collection, the MFA is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world and has over the last decade transformed and dedicated an entire wing to accommodate contemporary work by leading artists such as Campos-Pons.

Closer to Gallery Wendi Norris headquarters, three San Francisco institutions have acquired works by gallery artists. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have added to their collection an untitled work by Dorothea Tanning that, based on a description from her private journals, appears to be a “set design for an unrealized ballet” (c. 1950). Over the course of a remarkable seven-decade career as a painter, sculptor, and writer, Tanning created more than 400 works of art, collaborated with poets and playwrights, and published two volumes of poetry, two memoirs, and a novel.

The de Young Museum in San Francisco has added Unsettling the Gravity of Assumptions (2021) by Ranu Mukherjee to its holdings. This 4-foot square painting with silk and sari fabric on linen is a luminous expression of Mukherjee’s ongoing concern with the conflicting forces of ecology and non-human agency, diasporas and migrations, and motherhood and transnational feminisms.

Finally, the San Francisco Arts Commission, established as a city agency in 1932 to champion artists and their unique power to transform neighborhoods, personal experience, and social interaction, has acquired Sea Change (2020), by Val Britton. This immersive triptych of 3-square foot collages on paper is the artist’s second work to join SFAC’s collection. We congratulate and thank the Commission for its support of San Francisco artists and its dedication to integrating the arts into all aspects of city life.