New to the Museum: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

Mirroring the expansive nature of the Museum’s collection, recently acquired works on paper represent a wide variety of media and cultures and span 500 years, from an early 16th-century woodcut to a digital work created in a virtual platform from 2017 by the Indigenous artist Skawennati. New to the Museum: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs will showcase many of these rare and fascinating works.

More than 2,400 works on paper have entered the Museum’s collection since the 2016 exhibition A Decade of Collecting: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Since then, several exhibitions focused on vernacular photography, early modern European prints, Black abstraction, and contemporary art, have featured recent acquisitions. New to the Museum celebrates new arrivals that have not yet been displayed.

The 65 works on view were acquired through both purchase and gift and have come to the Museum one by one but also in groups. Some works, such as Max Beckmann’s striking portrait of his wife, Quappi with Violin, meaningfully build on areas of existing strength for the Museum. Works by other artists such as Xenobia Bailey, Norval Morrisseau, and Janet Fish increase the Museum’s focus on collecting the work of Black, Indigenous, and women artists, historically underrepresented in the Museum’s collection. For example, Emma Amos’ print To Sit (with Pochoir) demonstrates both her technical experimentation and her investment in drawing upon and refiguring conventions of art history. It is the first work by the artist to enter the collection.

New to the Museum focuses on the extraordinary objects and the artists who made them, as well as the ways in which these objects arrived at the Museum.  A few key questions animate this presentation: How did the works come to the Museum? How do they complement, build on, or expand the collection?

Often these backstories illuminate fascinating local connections, with numerous St. Louis donors, artists, or subjects highlighted. Longtime Washington University art professor Leslie Laskey’s Highlands woodcut focuses on the now-demolished roller coaster that was a centerpiece of a legendary amusement park, which stood on the current site of Forest Park Community College.

New to the Museum: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs is co-curated by Eric Lutz, associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs; Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs; and Clare Kobasa, assistant curator of prints, drawings, and photographs; with research assistant Hannah Wier.