Friends of the Collection
If you believe in the growth, diversification, and strengthening of the PMA collection, this is the group for you.
Founded by a group of visionary women in 1983, the Friends of the Collection is instrumental in bringing greater diversity and equity to the PMA through the acquisition, conservation, and care for the collection and related programing. Thanks to the generosity of Friends of the Collection, the PMA is reaching a broader audience through the acquisition of works by Ahmed Alsoudani, David C. Driskell, Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Marguerite Zorach, and many more, helping the museum fulfill its Art for All mission and shaping its extraordinary collection of more than 18,000 works.
2024 Focus: Contemporary American Photography
In 2024, in addition to supporting our collection conservation work, the Friends of the Collection will support the PMA’s purchase of four photographs aimed at expanding our photography holdings and narratives of American art. The four selected photographs are TV Indians (2017), Spirits of Siwavaats (2019), and Winka & The Windmills (2019) by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, born 1977), and Hinushi 9 (2023) by Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw, born 1980).
About the Artists and Their Works
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, born 1977)
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, born 1977), TV Indians, 2017, archival pigment print on Legacy Platine paper, 38 7/8 x 59 5/8 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Cara Romero. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved
American photographer Cara Romero has emerged as one of the most compelling artists of her generation. Her theatrical compositions draw from both studio and landscape traditions based in her extensive training in film, digital, fine art, and commercial photography. Refusing narratives of the bygone Indian so prevalent in popular culture and academia, she shifted from her studies in cultural anthropology to the power of the photographic medium to reveal the modernity of Native peoples and their worldviews. TV Indians (Color), 2017, made partially in response to the work of Edward Curtis, pointedly pairs modern Indigenous people with precisely these problematic representations on television. Sitting upon a pile of televisions framed by a dramatic sky, these five figures tower over the diminutive screens. The infant held at right indicates not only the cycle of life but also the continuation and futurity of Indigenous traditions. The young boys of Winka and the Windmills, 2019, and Spirits of Siwavaats, 2019, embody this futurity as well while also remaining steadfastly individuals in the landscape. Posing with a vintage pickup truck, these youth claim it as their own along with its significance as a trope of Americana. Romero collaborates closely with her models, often friends and relatives, who come from many tribal backgrounds and regions, to stage photographs that contribute to their communities, upturning much photographic history that exploited and endangered native peoples.
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, born 1977), Winka & The Windmills, 2019, archival pigment print on Legacy Platine paper, 26 5/16 x 39 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Cara Romero. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, born 1977), Spirits of Siwavaats, 2019, archival pigment print on Legacy Platine paper, 23 3/16 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Cara Romero. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved
Raised between the rural setting of the Chemehuevi reservation in the Mojave Desert of California and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas, Romero now lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions, most recently in The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, The MoMA’s Our Selves: Photographs by Women Photographers, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Water Memory, and The Minneapolis Institute of Art’s In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now. Her first solo exhibition, PANÛPÜNÜWÜGAI (Living Light), will open at the Hood Museum of Art in 2025. She has been awarded Best in Class and First Place in Photography multiple times at both the Heard Museum of Art’s Guild Indian Fair and Market and the Sante Fe Indian Market. Her work is in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Center for Creative Photography, Detroit Institute of Art, Denver Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Gallery of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, amongst many others. These three photographs will be the first by Romero to enter the PMA’s permanent collection.
Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw, born 1980)
Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw, born 1980), Hinushi 9, 2023, woven archival inkjet prints on Hahnemühle bamboo paper and Hahnemühle rice paper, beeswax, and tape, 79 1/2 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery. © Sarah Sense. Image courtesy of Artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Multimedia artist Sarah Sense combines landscape photography and extensive archival research with a deep commitment to Indigenous basket weaving. Hinushi 9, which consists of photographs of the artist’s ancestral homelands woven through colonial maps and historical documents into Choctaw sun and stars patterns, is part of a larger body of work that collapses the past and the present. Since 2004 Sense has drawn upon traditional Chitimacha and Choctaw techniques to create unique multimedia works that spiritually reclaim the lands from which colonial forces displaced her ancestors. Hinushi incorporates maps of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, blue Choctaw allotments from McCurtain County, Oklahoma, with photographs of Lewis and Clark’s journals and landscapes from Broken Bow lands, where her family was forcefully relocated at the terminus of the brutal “long walk” in execution of the US Indian Removal Act of 1830. These seemingly disparate elements are revealed as irretrievably connected through the Choctaw sun and stars pattern derived from her Grandma Chillie’s basket. Reclaiming the land through her grandmother’s practice—a kind of worldmaking unto its own—Sense reframes history as a constellation of cosmic forces dotted with the cruelty, resilience, and hope of humanity.
Raised in California, Sense grew up with the extensive basket collection of Laverne Blanche Jones, her Choctaw grandmother and a deep awareness of her Chitimacha relatives’ basketry in Louisiana. When she was 18, Sense was recruited to research the Chitimacha basket collection at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles. In the process, she recovered patterns previously lost to the current generation of reservation weavers. As she became more involved with the Chitimacha community she simultaneously received her BFA from California State University, Chico, and then her MFA from the Parsons School of Design, The New School. In 2004, she requested permission from Alton D. LeBlanc, then Chitimacha Nation chairman, to weave with nontraditional materials. When this was granted her practice of weaving one of her photographs of the reservation was initiated. “This was my way of ‘weaving’ myself back into the community,” she reflects. A curator and scholar as well, her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, the Smithsonian Institutions, the National Gallery of Canada, the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana Museum, Choctaw Headquarters, and Harvard University, amongst many others. Hinushi 9 will be the first work by Sense to enter the PMA’s permanent collection.
2023 Focus: The Sights and Sounds of Night by Vincent Smith
Vincent Smith (United States, 1929–2003), The Sights and Sounds of Night, 1972, oil and collage on canvas, 42 x 50 inches. © The Estate of Vincent Smith, Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Born in 1929 in Brooklyn, NY, Vincent Smith began taking classes at the Art Students League after a transformational visit to the Cezanne retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. Describing his experience of that exhibition, Smith said, “I came away so moved with a feeling that I had been in touch with something sacred.”
In 1955, he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, where he met Ben Shahn and Marguerite and William Zorach. Returning to New York, his subjects became the jazz concerts, families, and scenes of daily life in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Active participation in the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements prompted a deep interest in African art, and the works of African American artists such as Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, and Jacob Lawrence.
In 1974, the PMA held a solo exhibition of Smith’s work that featured 13 paintings with the intention of “introduc[ing] this leading Black artist to Maine.” The Sights and Sounds of Night was included in that exhibition and drew from Smith’s interest in capturing the sound and atmosphere of jazz with the texture and feeling of close-knit urban environments. The PMA is thrilled to bring this work of art back to Maine almost 50 years later.
“Visit the quiet and passionately inquiring mind of Vincent Smith and what is gently revealed is an impressive and dynamic display of black history, memory and creative workmanship in a very unique visual experience.” –David Driskell
Smith was championed by David Driskell, and with contributions to Friends of the Collection, the PMA will bring this painting into the collection in honor of one of Maine’s most beloved and influential artists.
Past acquisitions and exhibitions supported by the Friends of the Collection
The Friends of the Collection has historically supported the acquisition of many iconic objects, including Hiram Powers’ marble bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Marguerite Zorach’s Diana of the Sea; Celeste Roberge’s Rising Cairn; and Charles Duback’s The Coopers; among many others. More recently, the Friends of the Collection has contributed to incredible acquisitions including Isamu Noguchi’s Play Sculpture (circa 1975-1976) that now resides in The David E. Shaw and Family Sculpture Park; the acquisition of the painting Ghetto Wall #2 (1970) by the legendary American modernist David Driskell (1931–2020); American Bardo (2020) by sculptor Sheila Pepe and Humming at the Gate (2020) by painter Carrie Moyer, which were featured in the PMA’s exhibition Tabernacles for Trying Times; and most recently, photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier and Carrie Mae Weems. This group also helps to fund acquisition-related expenses, including the shipment of Andrew Wyeth’s River Cove (1958), a gift made by David Rockefeller in memory of his son, Dr. Richard Rockefeller, and exhibitions including Stories of Maine: An Incomplete History.
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