Recent Acquisitions

By Graham Boettcher, Ph.D., The William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art Last fall, thanks to the generosity of James Milton and Sallie Johnson, the Museum acquired this exquisite and […]

The BMA has a fine collection of “glass house whimsies”—also known as “end-of-the-day glass”—which were items made by glass workers on their own time, for their own use and enjoyment, or to demonstrate their skill. These include glass canes, smoking pipes, swords, gavels, and this colorful rolling pin, recently given by longtime BMA docent Anne Burnette and her sister, Juanita Kilpatrick.

Catherine and William Cabaniss have generously donated two significant prints by outstanding artists Radcliffe Bailey and Chris Ofili in honor of Ron Platt’s seven-year tenure as the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Dr. Roy T. Ward from Watkinsville, Georgia, has been a friend of the Museum for over twenty years. His first donation of Japanese prints to the collection came in 1995, and, since then, he has generously donated other outstanding Japanese prints and woodblock printed books to the Museum. This past summer Dr. Ward invited Donald Wood, the Museum’s Asian Art curator, to visit and choose gifts for the Museum from his collection.

The Clarence B. Hanson, Jr. Library is pleased to announce two recent gifts to its collection of books on Asian art.

While the majority of the BMA’s purchased acquisitions come from commercial galleries and auction houses, occasionally museum-quality works of art surface in unexpected places. This past October, our Curator of American Art, Graham Boettcher, found such a work in a Chicago antique store.

Fifteen Japanese prints are a recent gift to the Museum from the estate of Larry D. Luke of Huntsville. The prints are from the 1940s-1960s and represent the work of the finest woodblock print artists active in Japan at the time.

Through the generosity of board member Henry Lynn, the Museum has recently acquired a large snake-handled vase made between 1858 and 1859 by the Minton pottery manufactory in Staffordshire, England.

Thanks to the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Herb Sklenar and their family, the Museum purchased a major example of 18th-century English landscape painting. This glorious view of Chatsworth, one of the stately “treasure houses” of Britain, was painted in about 1725 by Pieter Tillemans (1684-1734), a Flemish artist who played an important role in spreading the visual language of landscape painting.

The Museum recently acquired four new works of contemporary video art, gifts of Birmingham collectors Jack and Rebecca Drake. The videos were created by Kalup Linzy, Kambui Olujimi, Dave McKenzie and Jefferson Pinder, all African American artists born after 1970.

A rare and important work has entered the Museum’s collection. The Murder of King Edward the Martyr at Corfe Castle is one of just three sculptures known by the artist […]

In early February, Philadelphia miniatures expert and dealer Elle Shushan, a contributor to the catalogue for the popular exhibition The Look of Love, visited the BMA. Curator of American Art Graham Boettcher invited Shushan into collection storage to examine the Museum’s small and little-studied collection of American portrait miniatures. Opening the drawer of a storage cabinet, a portrait of a woman in early-19th-century attire caught Shushan’s eye.