Members of the Museum’s Collectors’ Collaborative met at the Independent Art Fair in New York City on March 3rd. Now in its tenth year, this group of Bowdoin alumni gathers twice annually to attend exhibitions and other art-related events. Through their contributions, they also support the purchase of a contemporary artwork for the Museum. Acquisitions in recent years include works by artists such as Alyson Schotz, Leslie Hewitt, Malick Sidibe, and Mel Bochner. Last year the Collaborative helped to purchase the Museum’s first hologram, the Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s When H2 Leaves O (2015).

Black artists in America during the Civil Rights movement are to be explored in a new exhibition at Tate Modern. This summer the museum will present Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a landmark exhibition exploring how these issues played out among and beyond African American artists from 1963 to 1983. At a time when race and identity became major issues in music, sport and literature brought to public attention by iconic figures like Aretha Franklin, Muhammad Ali and Toni Morrison, ‘Black Art’ was being defined and debated across the country in vibrant paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures. Featuring more than 150 works by over 60 artists, many on display in the UK for the first time, Soul of a Nation will be a timely opportunity to see how American cultural identity was re-shaped at a time of social unrest and political struggle.​

Also in that category are Barbara Bloom’s mock travel posters from 1981—bearing slogans all too relevant to the current political climate—at David Lewis gallery, sold as a set of ten for $75,000 or individually for $10,000. In the next booth, Garth Greenan Gallery made the particularly inspired move of showing Howerdena Pindell’s video drawings from 1976, in which she photographed images on TV, covered them in tiny annotations and marks, and re-photographed them. These were on offer for $25,000 each, and around half had already sold within hours. 

Garth Greenan Gallery is showing 12 prints by Howardena Pindell from her Video Drawings series (1974–76). They show stills from televised sports, which Pindell has superimposed with transparencies that she’s annotated with minuscule numbers and flying arrows. There is apparently no mathematical logic to her additions, though they vaguely correspond to the action depicted: boxing, a football game, lifting weights. Her cryptic marks are like an invented language that attempts to compute these athletes’ herculean movements.

The Independent art fair may be devoted mainly to young and emerging artists, but this year, it also has some wonderful art by a giant of postwar abstraction. At Garth Greenan’s booth, works from Howardena Pindell’s “Video Drawings” series from the mid-1970s are on view for the first time publicly in New York since 1976.