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).
At the Independent Art Fair earlier this spring, the group met and talked with two prominent female artists, Howardena Pindell and Katharine Bradford. Pindell was exhibiting at the Garth Greenan Gallery twelve unique video drawings she created in the 1970s. The subject of a full-career retrospective that will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2018, she spoke about this series of drawings as it relates to her larger practice and about her upbringing as an artist in Philadelphia and then New York. Similarly, Bradford spoke about three paintings then on view at her gallery CANADA and her process for thinking about and creating new work. Though she lives in New York, she has long spent summers in Brunswick and in 2013 had a critically-successful solo exhibition of her paintings at the Museum.
Over the next three months, members of the Collectors’ Collaborative will have an opportunity to contribute to and vote for a new acquisition. The Museum anticipates posting the short-listed works under consideration shortly. We will share the outcome of that vote later this summer. On behalf of the Museum, many thanks to Ellen Grenley ’06, Victoria Lichtendorf ’97, Chad MacDermid ‘00, and Isabel Taube ’92 for their work in organizing this gathering. If you would like to make a contribution to this year’s acquisition, please contact the Museum’s administrative assistant Caroline Baljon (cbaljon@bowdoin.edu).