by Andrew Chalk
Artworks by Sarah Cain, Johnny Floyd, Danielle Mckinney, Jordan Nassar, Susan Weil, and Carrie Yamaoka Selected for DMA's Permanent Collection
Johnny Floyd, Upon Reflection, I am Aphrodite's Pearls Strung Across the Firmament, 2021. Oil, acrylic & gold leaf on canvas.
24 x 36 in / 61cm x 91.5. Courtesy the artist and Conduit Gallery.
(DALLAS, TX — November 11, 2021) — Today, the Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) are pleased to announce the selections for the fifth Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program, an annual acquisition gift for the DMA’s permanent collection. The DMA’s Interim Chief Curator Dr. Nicole R. Myers, the DMA’s Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art Dr. Vivian Li, and a group of donors have selected works by Sarah Cain, Johnny Floyd, Danielle Mckinney, Jordan Nassar, Susan Weil, and Carrie Yamaoka from the fair. "The works we have chosen from this year’s Dallas Art Fair demonstrate the DMA’s commitment to artists at all stages of their careers—from Johnny Floyd who began painting three years ago, to Susan Weil whose distinguished career spans over seventy years. A great number of works address the historical exclusion of female artists and perspectives, such as the arresting female gaze in Danielle McKinney's contemplative self-portrait. Others, like the new works by Sarah Cain, Jordan Nassar, and Carrie Yamaoka, ingeniously blur the distinctions between fine art and craft, visibility and invisibility, and the nation and home to reassess the categories of nationality, race, gender, and medium. We are thrilled how these artists boldly engaging in abstraction, minimalism and figuration will broaden and deepen the stories we can present at the DMA,” says Dr. Vivian Li, Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA.
L: Jordan Nassar, A sun in the room, 2021. Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi. R: Sarah Cain, Jamillah, 2021. Acrylic, color copies, UV seal, and backpack on canvas. Courtesy the artist and BROADWAY.
The acquisition program is an annual initiative connecting the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Art Fair, and the Dallas Art Fair’s participating galleries. The Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program has funded $550,000 for the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection to date, including this year’s grant of $100,000. "The Dallas Museum of Art has one of the strongest collections in the country and every year we are delighted to contribute to it. This fund ensures we and our exhibitors meaningfully connect with the museum, while helping artworks find a permanent home in a landmark cultural institution. It always excites me seeing our exhibitors’ works become part of DMA shows; at the last fair, the museum acquired a Sheila Hicks piece that became one of the starring works in its Hicks exhibition later that year,” says Dallas Art Fair Director Kelly Cornell. "Our relationship with the Dallas Art Fair is exciting, and we are so grateful for the fair’s continued support of the Museum. Every year, the Dallas Art Fair presents works by some of the most promising young artists and well-established names, reflecting the depth and richness of our city’s artistic community. We are honored to be the recipient of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program and the wonderful opportunity to grow our collection,” says DMA Director Dr. Agustín Arteaga. The 2021 program donors are Tricia and Gil Besing, Zoe Bonnette, Susan and Shawn Bonsell, Sheryl and Geoff Green, Dianne and Mark Laroe, Fraser and Rhonda Marcus, Cliff Risman, Linda and David Rogers, Richard Ronzetti, Gowri and Alex N.K. Sharma, Marlene and John Sughrue, and The Dallas Art Fair Foundation.
L: Danielle Mckinney, Talk of the Town, 2021. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery. C: Susan Weil, Color Configurations 2 (Red), 1998. Acrylic on paper. Courtesy the artist and JDJ. R: Carrie Yamaoka, 40 by 30 (clear/black #2), 2021. Flexible urethane resin and black vinyl on wood panel. Courtesy the artist and Ulterior Gallery.
The selected works are:
Sarah Cain Jamillah, 2021 Acrylic, color copies, UV seal, and backpack on canvas 60 x 48 in / 152.4 x 121.9 cm Acquired from BROADWAY Johnny Floyd Upon Reflection, I am Aphrodite's Pearls Strung Across the Firmament, 2021 Oil, acrylic & gold leaf on canvas 24 x 36 in / 61cm x 91.5 Acquired from Conduit Gallery Danielle Mckinney Talk of the Town, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 16 in / 50.80 x 40.64 cm Acquired from Night Gallery
Jordan Nassar A sun in the room, 2021 Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton 27 x 29 inches / 69 x 74 cm Acquired from Anat Egbi
Susan Weil Color Configurations 2 (Red), 1998 Acrylic on paper 60 x 66 in / 152.4 x 167.6 cm Acquired from JDJ
Carrie Yamaoka 40 by 30 (clear/black #2), 2021 Flexible urethane resin and black vinyl on wood panel 40 x 30 x 2 in / 101.6 x 76.2 x 5.1 cm Acquired from Ulterior Gallery
ABOUT THE ARTISTS Sarah Cain (b. 1979) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, New York; North Carolina Museum of Art; Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; and San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas, among others. Johnny Floyd (b. 1984) is a self-taught painter working in Detroit, MI. He started painting when it became clear that creating was the only thing that made sense. Building on a foundational academic infrastructure based in Psychology and Sociolinguistics, Floyd’s work examines the African American experience through an interrogation of both historical and current cultural phenomena while simultaneously imagining a future in which Blackness in The United States of America is a sustainable condition. Through the melding of figurative, surrealistic, and abstracted practices, Floyd employs a broad artistic lens that coalesces into a visual language better suited to articulate this future. His practice is a process-driven meditation on an amalgamation of classical mythologies, ancestral connection, modern Black cultural artifacts, and historical record. Floyd addresses these themes through an improvisational approach to traditional art techniques and methodologies--a process that allows him to produce works that adhere to a specific thematic/narrative arc while remaining uniquely responsive to the environment(s) in which he is creating. He strives to allow his practice to be one of resistance, recovery, and reparation. Conduit Gallery presented Johnny Floyd’s first solo gallery exhibition, October 9 through November 13, 2021. His work was also donated to the 2021 Two X Two Auction for AIDS and Art, where it received great recognition. Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981, Montgomery, AL) received her MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen, CO; Night Gallery, Los Angeles CA; and Fortnight Institute, New York, NY. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Asia Art Center, Taipei; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Half Gallery, New York, NY; and FLAG Foundation, New York, NY. Mckinney has been featured in several publications, including Elephant, Mousse Magazine, Artnet News, and Juxtapoz, among others. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. Jordan Nassar’s (b.1985, New York, NY) hand embroidered textile pieces address an intersecting field of language, ethnicity and the embedded notions of heritage and homeland. Treating craft within its capacity as communicative form, Nassar examines conflicting issues of identity and cultural participation using geometric patterning adapted from Islamic symbols present in traditional Palestinian hand embroidery. Nassar generates these symbols via computer and then meticulously hand stitches them onto carefully mapped-out patterns. In the enmeshing and encoding of these symbols within his work, Nassar roots his practice in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized by both conflict and unspoken harmony. He earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Evelyn Yard, London, UK, Exile Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work is included in the current group exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950 – 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nassar’s work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY. Susan Weil (b. 1930) draws inspiration from nature, literature, art history, and her own lived experience. Weil came of age as an artist in the postwar period studying under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College with Willem & Elaine de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg & Cy Twombly. Three bodies of work art on view in this presentation: the spray paint drawings and screenprints from the early 1970s, the soft fold paintings from the 1980s & 1990S, and the configurations from the 2000s. Despite the fact that the works have been made in a time span of nearly four decades, they all articulate a sense of corporeality though her inventive use of abstraction. Her work has been exhibited at institutions across the United States and Europe, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, Asheville, NC; and the Museo Reina Sofa, Madrid. Her work is included in a number of international museum and institutional collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm among others. She will open a solo exhibition in 2022 at JDJ the Ice House, Garrison, NY. She lives and works in New York. Carrie Yamaoka (b.1957, Glen Cove, NY) has exhibited her work widely in the US and Europe since the 1980s. Yamaoka has shown widely in the US and Europe since the 1990s. Her work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Art Institute, Chicago. Yamaoka received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2017 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include pour crawl peel at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, California (2020), Panorama at Ulterior (2019) and Lucien Terras, New York, NY (2015). Her work was featured in arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified at Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art & Design, Ohio, and included in exhibitions at the ICA in Philadelphia (2018–2019) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020). She is also a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. ABOUT THE DALLAS ART FAIR In the heart of the downtown arts district, the Dallas Art Fair offers collectors, arts professionals, and the public the opportunity to engage with a rich selection of modern and contemporary artworks presented by leading national and international galleries. Thoughtfully curated exhibitions and innovative programming encourage lively conversations and close looking in a robust and rapidly growing arts community. www.dallasartfair.com