Museum Acquisitions 2025

ISABELLA DUCROT
The Visited Land IV, 2025

The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art
Oslo, Norway

 

Ducrot’s “Visited Lands” began as an outgrowth of her “Bella Terra” works: bucolic, sweeping landscapes that exalt the simplicity and purity of the earth’s bountiful beauty. However, these new “Visited Lands” make use of textures and hues from beyond this planet, creating a cosmic connection with the celestial realms while raising questions about the status of the earth’s resources and precarious ecologies. 

DEREK FORDJOUR
Highstep Double, 2019

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Memphis, TN

 

Highstep Double (2019) features two marching band performers in a high-step, their backs bending backward in extreme, symmetrical poses. Often layering various newspaper clippings and cardboard scraps to ground his pictures, Fordjour’s canvases are embedded with textural elements from discarded or reused materials, representing an ethos of resourcefulness which has been a constant for the artist since his early work. Here, Fordjour explores the cultural significance of high step marching bands in the American South, at the intersection of race, sports, and entertainment.

NIKITA GALE
TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), 2023-2024

Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY

 

Nikita Gale’s TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME) (2023-2024) features a modified player piano that has been programmed to silently play a series of performances by various pop musicians, exploring the space between a score and its performance. The work examines how labor, performance, authorship, legibility, and sensing are beholden to their technological contexts.

STEFANIE HEINZE
<3 2 <3, 2024

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Turin, Italy

 

Featured in the first solo institutional exhibition of Stefanie Heinze, Your Mouth Comes Second, this work reflects the artist’s central concerns: the exploration of tenderness, vulnerability, and companionship; the integration of ancient and urban spiritualism; and the depiction and processing of raw materials. Here, Heinze delves into the realm of observation, sensitivity, appropriation, clumsiness, and uncertainty, channeling her curiosity about the unknown through the act of painting.

 

RODNEY MCMILLIAN
Sky (Paradise) 6, 2022

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Washington D.C.

 

Through his “sky paintings,” such as Sky (Paradise) 6 (2022), Rodney McMillian uses industrial-grade black vinyl to mold swathes of evocative shapes. Though largely abstract, the wall-hangings intimate at skin, carefully stitched. On a societal level, the seams translate to turbulent constructions of social, cultural, and economic delineations. “The abstraction is about the shock of the politics, the shock of the murder and death, the shock of the history,” says McMillian.

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled (Donald), 1994

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY

 

The historical work Untitled (Donald) (1994) features one of Joyce Pensato’s muses, Donald Duck, with a rounded, bulbous body, as though he might topple over. Often portraying her characters with disembodied features, here, Pensato has chosen to portray Donald with a round shape for his lower body, infusing the canvas with a sense of wobbly, mischievous movement.

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, n.d.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Miami, FL

 

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami has acquired a range of historical works by Joyce Pensato, including an enamel rendering of Donald Duck on paper, a suite of rare charcoal drawings, and abstract oil paintings, the latter two groups made in the 80s. This decade marked a pivotal moment in Pensato’s development as an artist, during which she became fixated on one of her primary cartoon subjects, Mickey Mouse, and established her distinct visual lexicon. Pensato shares more on this time in a 2017 recording from her studio produced by the Whitney Museum: “The 80s gave me the freedom to just work. I was all about drawing and graphic and black and white and accepted who I was rather than trying to paint like somebody else. And so, I became one, you know, one as an artist with my language and imagery. And I realized I could invent my own space. And that was a big breakthrough.”

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, 1980

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Miami, FL

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, 1986

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Miami, FL

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, 1986

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Miami, FL

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, 1987

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Miami, FL

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, 1987

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Miami, FL

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled, n.d.

The Morgan Library & Museum
New York, NY

 

The Morgan Library & Museum has acquired a suite of historical works by Joyce Pensato, including two works on paper depicting Bart Simpson and an “eyes” charcoal and pastel work on paper. Pensato’s recurring use of contemporary cartoon characters such as Bart Simpson serve as a basis to communicate the underlying darkness, anxiety, and aggression that underlies American pop culture, emoted through obsessive, graphic gesture. Over the course of her career, Pensato returned time and again to the motif of eyes as a way to step back from the literalness of the full cartoon character face and refocus on expressive abstraction inherent in the circularity of a character’s eyes.

JOYCE PENSATO
Untitled (Bart Simpson), 1994

The Morgan Library & Museum
New York, NY

JOYCE PENSATO
OO Two, 2014

The Morgan Library & Museum
New York, NY

PIETER SCHOOLWERTH & PHIL VANDERHYDEN
Supporting Actor, 2024

National Gallery of Victoria
Melbourne, Australia

 

The CGI-animated film Supporting Actor follows an animated avatar of musician Aaron Dilloway, who moves through several sets: a tiled bathroom, a club, and a space akin to a studio or gallery. Our story begins in the bathroom, where, as the protagonist brushes his teeth, the sound conjures anthropomorphic stains on the Celotex ceiling tiles. Suddenly, a stain above opens a portal, welcoming him into a fantastical club. Equal parts Star Wars cantina and psychedelic cabaret, the luminous environment pulses with stain-shaped figures, dancing ecstatically to Dilloway’s soundtrack. Supporting Actor plunges us into a labyrinth of connections and regresses—an echo of the mirage in which we increasingly live via online doubles. 

ZORAWAR SIDHU AND ROB SWAINSTON
Saffron, 2025

Syracuse University Art Museum
Syracuse, NY

 

Part of the “Spring Wake” series, Saffron depicts images of protest associated with the flower’s native land. For each work in this series, each indigenous flora is overlaid atop the local environmental threat—for example, Japanese Lily layers images of activists protesting the radioactive water released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea, while Fairy Primrose depicts protests of the ecocide resulting from the ongoing Ukraine War. In this piece, the saffron flower is laid over scenes of protest, with signs written in various languages demanding climate justice, a signifier of the hyper-local, yet universal, peril of climate disaster.

COSIMA VON BONIN
Hetero, 2020

The Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL

 

A Bambi-esque fawn, a recurring figure in von Bonin’s world, perches on a mint green trunk in von Bonin’s Hetero (2020), the soft shape of the animal molded in velvet, mohair, and cotton atop a hard-edged metal box. In Cosima von Bonin’s works, inherent contradictions and cryptic humor often engage a play with words and images. Here, von Bonin’s Bambi represents a flurry of binaries and associated signifiers: hard and soft, masculine and feminine, subject and object.

CHARLINE VON HEYL
Red and Yeller, 2004

The George Economou Collection
Athens, Greece

 

Charline von Heyl’s Red and Yeller (2004) is a dynamic, visceral painting that exemplifies her distinctive approach to abstraction. Executed in acrylic and oil on a large canvas, it pulses with energy through layers of gestural marks and a vivid palette of red, yellow, orange, and black. Broad brushstrokes, graphic contours, and areas of transparency create a rhythm that resists easy interpretation. As with much of her work, it challenges viewers to engage with painting as “a self-generating machine that finds its own soul.” This metaphor reflects von Heyl’s strategic process: rather than following a pre-planned image, each work evolves through creative problem-solving, developing its own logic and identity—hovering between abstraction and figuration, spontaneity and control.