RECENT ACQUISITIONS
Enhancing the Collection Both Inside and
Outside the Walls of the CMA
Will South, chief curator
The Columbia Museum of Art’s most
visible recent acquisition is Steven Naifeh’s
bold steel sculpture, Jali, installed outside
in the Museum’s beautiful Boyd Plaza.
While Jali has been on view since the
beginning of the year, it only became part
of the collection by a unanimous vote of
the CMA’s Collections Committee on
June 5. Already this sculpture feels like a
signature work for the Museum, an object
that both stands in for and symbolizes the
institution that surrounds it.
It is creative, daring, big and colorful,
and people love to step onto its base and
have their picture taken—in short, they
want to be a part of it. The artist, Steven
Naifeh, was the subject of an eye-opening
one-person retrospective exhibition at the
CMA this summer where visitors of all
ages were captivated by his highly refined
abstractions based on both modern and
ancient precedents.
In the last issue of Collections, Sue and
Dwight Emanuelson were featured for their
extraordinary generosity toward the CMA.
This summer, the Emanuelsons again
stepped forward with wonderful gifts of
contemporary American art. Among them
is Mel Rosas’ El Hombre de Conocimiento
(Man of Knowledge), a slightly surreal
painting executed with tremendous skill
and imagination.
In his work, Rosas explores “the spirit
within discarded, abandoned, mundane,
or disparaged street environments.” Often
the artist is represented by a lone figure,
an alter ego who roams from painting to
painting. Rosas writes that “. . . his quest
Steven Naifeh, American, born 1952, Jali XXXVII, 2013, anodized and painted steel. Gift of 1st Avenue Associates in 2013.
columbiamuseum.org
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