Recent Art News
American Indian Art |
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| Written by Gaylord Torrence |
| Sunday, 25 October 2009 05:31 |
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Active on behalf of the Kansas City community, Estelle and Morton Sosland have been involved with the Nelson-Atkins for nearly six decades. Their collection of American Indian art, built over the past 50 years, represents a commitment to connoisseurship that contains superb examples of Northwest Coast artistry, a region defined as the narrow strip of land bordered by the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains, from Vancouver Island to Alaska’s Yakutat Bay. “This gift is a triumph of selflessness,” said Marc F. Wilson, the Menefee D. and Mary Louise Blackwell Director/CEO of the Nelson-Atkins. “Morton and Estelle followed their own keen interest in works of the Pacific Northwest and combined that passion with counsel from experts and scholars to assemble this remarkable collection. These works of art have been part of their intimate daily lives, and now they are sharing them with the public at large. It is a fitting capstone to their decades of service to the Museum and an act of enormous generosity.” On November 11, the Museum will unveil its new galleries dedicated to American Indian art. Comprising more than 6,100 square feet, the galleries will be among the largest devoted to American Indian art in any comprehensive art museum in the world and will quadruple the space previously devoted to American Indian art at the Nelson-Atkins. Located immediately adjacent to the Museum’s newly reinstalled American art galleries, the new galleries provide visitors with an uninterrupted, contiguous look at the achievements of American artists from pre-European contact to the present, an approach rarely, if ever, taken by a fine arts museum. “The Sosland Collection is one of the most outstanding groups of Northwest Coast Indian objects in the nation and includes a significant number of true masterworks,” said Steve Brown, former associate curator of Native American Art at the Seattle Art Museum and a leading authority on Northwest Coast objects. “Estelle and Morton Sosland have been thoughtful and dedicated collectors who have passionately pursued some of the finest examples of Northwest Coast art.” The expansion and reinterpretation of the Museum’s collection have been led by Gaylord Torrence, the Fred and Virginia Merrill Senior Curator of American Indian Art at the Nelson-Atkins and one of the nation’s foremost authorities in the field. Torrence arrived at the Nelson-Atkins in 2002 as founding curator of the Museum’s first Department of American Indian Art. “This collection is transformative for the Nelson-Atkins and is especially significant because of the extraordinary objects from the Northwest Coast cultures,” Torrence said. “The Museum’s original holdings in this area were limited, and the Sosland Collection allows us to present a comprehensive view of Native American art that we otherwise could not have done. It greatly broadens our presentation.” Visit : http://www.nelson-atkins.org/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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