New Acquisitions on View at the Modern

Director Marla Price announces the acquisition of significant artworks by four illustrious artists—Jeffrey Gibson, Gabriel Orozco, Howardena Pindell, and Dyani White Hawk—for the Modern’s permanent collection.

Price comments, “Ranging across painting, mixed media, and sculpture, these four distinct works are indicative of each artist’s oeuvre, and we are honored to add them to our collection.” All four works are currently on view in the Modern’s first-floor galleries.

Jeffrey Gibson
I’m Not Perfect, 2014
Repurposed punching bag, repurposed wool army blanket, glass beads, tin jingles, nylon fringe, artificial sinew, and acrylic paint
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Jeffrey Gibson

Currently representing the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale, Jeffery Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado) champions overlooked narratives to create reflections of contemporary life. Of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, Gibson fuses Indigenous cultures and histories with references to pop culture, art history, and ideas about gender. This amalgamation of source material is evident throughout the artist’s installations, paintings, and sculptures.

I’m Not Perfect, 2014, was included in the artist’s 2018–19 retrospective This Is the Day and is part of his punching bag series. Gibson intricately adorns the found boxing equipment with glass beads and tin jingles. An object typically associated with aggression, action, and emotional release is transformed into a multilayered reexamination of masculinity and Indigenous ceremonies.

Additional pop culture and art references are evident in the sculpture. The eponymous embroidery around the top of the punching bag directly cites the title of a 1986 song by Grace Jones. In the music video, the 1980s icon undergoes beauty treatments to conform to contemporary standards of perfection. Ultimately, she victoriously reasserts her intrinsic value while wearing a skirt designed by Keith Haring. By combining the message of Jones’s song with symbols relating to his gender and cultural background, Gibson creates a nuanced meditation on a twenty-first-century man’s interior journey.

Gabriel Orozco
Vitruvius Nataraja, 2023
Tempera and gold leaf on linen canvas
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Gabriel Orozco

One of the most important Mexican artists of his generation, Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico) continually explores the intersections between culture and nature. Resisting categorization, Orozco has worked in photography, drawing, installation, sculpture, and painting, yet remains committed to the interconnections between everyday objects and human beings. Often combining complex geometry with organic forms, Orozco considers the relationship of order and idealism within reality.

Vitruvius Nataraja, 2023, encapsulates many central motifs in the artist’s career. Combining Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth-century Vitruvian Man with an ancient dancing Shiva, Orozco explores the dualities of male and female, entwining physical perfection with spiritual playfulness. Within the borders of the canvas, the artist encircles the overlay of Western ideals of order and beauty with Eastern spiritualities. This combination enables Orozco to provide a new paradigm wherein the connections between two seemingly opposite perspectives can be reinterpreted.

Howardena Pindell
Untitled #25 (For a Rabbit Named Pink), 2023
Mixed media on canvas
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Howardena Pindell

Artist, curator, educator, and activist Howardena Pindell (b, 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) demonstrates the transformative power wielded by the artist’s hand. Since the 1970s, Pindell’s expansive career has utilized a variety of media, employing texture, color, and process to explore social issues surrounding war, feminism, racism, and homelessness. Regardless of the material she engages with—ranging from paint and paper to video—the artist explores with destruction and reconstruction of the materials to reinforce her reexamination of understood artistic and social concepts. Pindell is among a group of women artists responsible for humanizing Minimalism by reintroducing handmade objects.

Untitled #25 (For a Rabbit Named Pink), 2023, is representative of Pindell’s extensive material experimentation. Thousands of meticulously hole-punched paper circles are embedded into a monochromatic color field of soft pink. Visible traces of labor are evident across the work’s surface, particularly in the clusters of circular paint bubbles where the artist squeegeed paint through handmade stencils. Beneath this textured surface, strips of canvas are sewn together, with the stitching peeking through to illuminate the presence of the grid. Like other Minimalist artists, Pindell utilizes the grid, though she buries it beneath layers of handmade minute details rather than highlighting it.

Dyani White Hawk
Truth and Consequences, 2023
Acrylic, oblong glass beads, and synthetic sinew on aluminum panel
Museum purchase
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Dyani White Hawk

Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976, Madison, Wisconsin) weaves together painting techniques with ancestral Indigenous practices to expose the universal language that is abstraction. White Hawk, who is Sičáŋǧu Lakota, illuminates the enduring strength, presence, and influence of Indigenous artistic practices on modern and contemporary art. For example, Lakota abstraction influenced artists Jackson Pollock and Marsden Hartley. By incorporating artisanal Indigenous handcrafts, including beadwork and quillwork, into her works, White Hawk reveals the connectedness of people and form across time and around the globe.

Her work’s exploration of abstraction as a global human practice connected to expression, adornment, and language continues in Truth and Consequences, 2023, in its use of geometric motifs. The diamond patterning at the work’s center represents a Lakota symbol for the connection between the spiritual and earthly worlds. Truth and Consequences highlights the balance between light and dark, paint and beads, allowing these “oppositional” elements to interact in a drive towards equilibrium. Working in collaboration with community members as she creates, White Hawk demonstrates her artistic, activist, and curatorial commitment to providing a platform for and advancing the careers of Native artists.