Collections Fall 2013 Volume 97 | Page 7

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 3