"New Acquisitions and Old Friends" exhibition brings together a large number of works new to the museum—many on view for the first time—alongside others that have been visitor favorites for decades. Ranging in date from 1948 to 2020, they represent a striking diversity of artistic backgrounds, techniques, and approaches.... Several of the artists represented have significant connections to Oberlin, Cleveland, or Ohio, a testament to the museum’s longstanding relationships with alumni artists and donors and its commitment to highlighting the artistic talents in our region. Gifts in celebration of the museum's 2017 centennial from artists Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Martin Kline, and Frank Stella are also on view, as are recent acquisitions by Josef Albers, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Agnes Martin, Tom Palmore, José Rodríguez, Betye Saar, Fanny Sanín, and Francisco Toledo, among many others.
Fanny Sanín (Colombian, born in 1938), who has lived in New York since 1971, is a central figure in Latin American abstraction. Over several decades she developed a personal language of hard-edged, geometric painting. This exhibition marks the first time that Sanín’s four works will be exhibited together at the museum, offering visitors the opportunity not only to view her painting, Acrylic No. 1, 2005, but also to experience her artistic process through three studies that demonstrate the artist’s play with form, color, and composition. Rendered in acrylic on paper or canvas over long periods of time, Sanín’s studies reveal the deceptive simplicity of the harmonious symmetry that prevails in her large-scale paintings.
In 2015, the artist gave the museum the large abstract painting displayed here in honor of Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Fine Arts at New York University, who spoke in Oberlin in 2014 in conjunction with an exhibition of Latin American art at the museum.
This exhibition was curated by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.