Tucked in jargony press releases thanking private donors, the substance of major museum acquisition announcements can be difficult to grasp. Larger museums acquired hundreds of works in 2024, including the Brooklyn Museum, which added 330 new pieces to its collection, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which brought on 626 works across three acquisition groupings.
We’ve parsed through museum acquisitions lists and compiled 10 notable additions to United States institutional collections in 2024, below. Remember, these may not be all currently on view, so check each museum’s website for the most up-to-date exhibition status of each work.
National Gallery of Art – Mirror Project Created in Support of Water Protectors
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC acquired New Mexico-based Cannupa Hanska Luger’s “Mirror Shield Project” (2016), which includes mirrors of various sizes and an approximately two-minute video. In 2016, inspired by the needs of the Water Protectors, who opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline, Luger made a video tutorial for a “mirror shield” made of thin wood and non-glass reflective material that protestors could use in frontline actions to reflect the image of police in riot gear back at them. He called upon people across the United States to help make them, and ultimately, more than 1,000 shields were delivered to Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, North Dakota. Some were used in an action in which hundreds of Water Protectors carried the shields while walking the Oceti Sakowin Camp in a serpent-like form.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – 115 Black Panther Party Photographs
While photographer Stephen Shames was a student at the University of California, Berkeley in 1965, he was tapped by Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale to become the organization’s official photographer. For the next eight years, Shames captured the daily activities of the Black Panther Party, focusing in particular on the group’s women members, who comprised about 65% of the organization’s membership. This year, MFA Boston acquired 115 prints of Shames’s photographs of Black Panther Party women, titled the Comrade Sisters series, including a 1972 image of a classroom at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, known as the Black Panther School, in Oakland, California. Earlier this year, 27 photographs by the artist, originally from Massachusetts, were on display at the Boston institution as part of the exhibition Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party.
The High Museum of Art – An Tribute to the “Godmother of African American Quilting“
Harriet Powers, a woman born into slavery in Georgia in 1837 who is widely considered the mother of African-American story quilting, is honored in the pictorial tradition she pioneered by artist and aerospace engineer Carolyn Mazloomi. Her textile tribute “Ode to Harriet Powers: Mother of African American Quilting” (2024) shows Powers at work in front of “Pictorial Quilt” (1895–89), one of her two surviving quilts, which portrays Bible stories across 15 blocks. Once a National Heritage Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts, Mazloomi had her first-ever gallery show earlier this year at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, highlighting her signature black-and-white quilting. Contrasting her previous monochrome textile work, “Ode to Harriet Powers: Mother of African American Quilting” bursts with earthly tones replicated by Mazloomi in an echo of Powers’s palette. The Atlanta museum told Hyperallergic that the acquisition of Mazloomi’s work is part of an ongoing quilt-collecting effort.
Art Institute of Chicago – Four Works by Formidable Grandma Moses
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, more famously known as “Grandma Moses,” didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was 78. Having spent most of her life as a farm wife and a mother of 10 children, only five of whom lived past their infancy, Moses only turned to the medium when embroidery became too difficult because of her arthritis. The self-taught artist captured scenes from rural New York state, showing her work internationally in her 90s and painting until she died at the age of 101 in 1961. According to the Art Institute of Chicago, her art was welcomed in the 1940s by an American public that rejected elitism and embraced her authenticity. The Chicago institution acquired Moses’s “The Cambridge Valley” (1942), “Thanksgiving Turkey” (c. 1940), “Home” (c. 1940), and “Burning of the Troy Bridge” (c. 1941) as gifts from the artists’ descendants this year.
J. Paul Getty Museum – A Flemish Renaissance Masterpiece
Once thought to be lost forever, Quentin Metsys’s “Madonna of the Cherries” is now on view in Los Angeles at the Getty Center’s Museum North Pavilion. Director Timothy Potts said the painting’s whereabouts were unknown after the 17th century, when its first buyer, Cornelis van der Geest, sold the work to an anonymous collector. The piece reappeared at an auction in Paris in 1920, this time with the background landscape covered in green paint. After 2015, when the work resurfaced once more as part of a Christie’s auction, the painting underwent conservation work to restore its original form. The cherries in the paintings likely allude to the passions of Christ and the fruits of heaven, while the apple represents Christ as a new Adam. This type of composition, Christie’s specialist Maja Markovic told Hyperallergic when the work went up for auction this summer, “focused on the maternal tenderness of the Virgin that she extended to all of mankind, emphasizing personal piety and a devotion to the Virgin Mary, who was seen as an intercessor for the Christian faithful, shortening the distance between the worshipper and the worshiped.” The Getty was the work’s top bidder, shelling out £10.66 million (~$13.4 million) for the work in July.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – Martin Wong in His Hometown
Martin Wong returned to his hometown of San Francisco following an AIDS diagnosis in 1994 after more than a decade of living in New York City and finding success in the Lower East Side arts scene. Painted in the last decade of his life but before he returned home, Wong’s “DC-3” (1992) depicts his San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood, interrupting the viewer’s field of vision with an image of an airplane that cuts through the composition. The faces of children peer out from circular windows. Known for his social realism, explorations of queer desire and urban life, and signature cowboy hat, Wong often included multilingual and cross-cultural elements in his work. SFMOMA described “DC-3” as autobiographical; Wong had grown up in the counterculture era of San Francisco when the city became the national hub of the gay rights movement. “DC-3” is the fifth work from the last decade of Wong’s life to join the museum’s collection.
Dallas Museum of Art – A Massive Cecily Brown Tryptic
British painter Cecily Brown was influenced by the hunting and market scenes of Flemish painter Frans Snyders to create her own slaughter scene in the oil tryptic “The Splendid Table” (2019–20). The work, featuring what appear to be game bird necks and the corpses of rabbits and deer meshed together with abstract strokes on a blood-red table, was gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art by the Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie Family/Labora Collection. “The Splendid Table” is the first Brown painting to be acquired by the Dallas institution, and appears in Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, which is on view now.
National Museum of African American History and Culture – Nat Turner’s Rebellion As Imagined by Christopher Myers
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired a nearly 32-foot-long tapestry by Brooklyn-based artist and writer Christopher Myers that explores the life of Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery in 1831. Filled with lips that appear stitched together, farm tools, red tears, and clashes between white and brown figures, Myers’s quilt is a “portrait of the man caught in the whirlwind of history, in a confluence of ideas and concepts, as are we all,” the artist said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. The acquisition is on view in the museum until June 8, 2025.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art – 300 Prints from Artists in Mexico
In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired 300 prints created between 1890 and 2007 by artists working in Mexico. Among the trove of North American prints is Mexican-American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett’s “Sharecropper” (1952), a linocut of an anonymous woman, printed in green, wearing a broad hat, which was meant to draw attention to the plight of Black women in the South. Catlett and other artists in the acquisition group are associated with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art), a progressive Mexico City art collective founded in 1937 that distributed thousands of prints for leftist causes. Select prints from the collection will go on display in early 2025.
Brooklyn Museum – Autobiographical Leather Carving
Winfred Rembert, who died in 2021, endured seven years of jail time and the horrifying experience of being nearly lynched. When he was released from incarceration, the artist gained acclaim for his leather-carved works, a technique he learned in prison. His wife encouraged him to make art based on his life experiences, and “Looking for Rembert” (2012), acquired by the Brooklyn Museum this year as a 200th-anniversary gift from Trustee Stephanie Ingrassia, depicts a chain gang and reflects on the cruelty of forced labor. The work is the first from the artist to enter the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.
