NEW ACQUISITIONS
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has an ongoing program of art acquisition, through gift, donation, or purchase. New acquisitions support and enhance the strengths of the Museum’s permanent collection as well as institutional initiatives, including a focus on emerging artists and Latin American art. Acquisitions are often directly related to the exhibition program – MCASD will commission artists to create new work as part of an exhibition, then acquire that work for the collection. In this way, exhibition research bears fruit for the permanent collection, and MCASD is able to serve as a primary patron of artists – a key element of the Museum’s mission.

An important source of acquisition funds are the two donor groups at MCASD: International Collectors and Contemporary Collectors. Since 1985, the Collectors have contributed over $2,000,000 in funds to purchase works for the collection, many by emerging artists. In addition, there are numerous contributions each year by individuals and foundations, designated specifically for art acquisition. Presented here are ten works that have recently been added to the permanent collection of MCASD.

Raymond Pettibon Robert Irwin Uta Barth

Jasper Johns Kim MacConnel Tony Oursler

Nancy Rubins Andres Serrano

Russell Crotty Fred Sandback

Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon’s drawings pair vivid, gestural depictions of aspects of American culture with text that is often ambiguous or provocative. No Title (Pardon me, but) features the cartoon character Vavoom, who—along with figures as diverse as Gumby, surfers, Charles Manson and Jesus Christ—appears throughout Pettibon’s work. A fragmented passage points to themes of nature and inspiration; though the captions evoke a comic-book structure, they complicate rather than clarify the meanings of the images that they accompany. Such dynamic interplay prompts the viewer to consider alternate modes of interpretation of text, picture, and the work as a whole.

Robert Irwin
Robert Irwin’s untitled work is part of a series of discs created between 1966 and 1969. The curved aluminum disc blurs the distinction between sculpture and painting: The artist illuminates them with spotlights in such a way that their edges become invisible and each appears to hover in space. The viewer experiences the disc as an apparition of light rather than a solid object, an ethereal entity that merges imperceptibly with its atmosphere.

Uta Barth
Uta Barth selects quiet, familiar subject matter for her photographs, foregrounding the process of looking itself rather than the object. Her works take on the quality of still-life paintings and experiment with cinematic effects. In Untitled, the repetition of the image of flowers on a table suggests a sense of time, even a vague narrative. The shift in colors and the illusion of the image moving out of focus evoke the afterimage that one may perceive after staring at an object; the viewer becomes aware of the visual phenomena that enable and shape perception.

Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns helped to pioneer Pop art in the United States through the incorporation of everyday images and objects such as targets and flags into his paintings. Light Bulb I marked his entry into sculpture and is one of several works in which he uses light bulb imagery. Inspired by the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Johns plays on the concept of the readymade—the everyday object which achieves artistic significance through modification of its appearance and context. By using a traditional artistic medium to replicate a basic household commodity in its exact dimensions, Johns questions binaries such as "high" and "low," skilled and unskilled, artistic and utilitarian.

Kim MacConnel
Kim MacConnel was a foremost member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. Female artists led the movement, and feminist concerns in part motivated the interest in Native American Indian and non-Western art and in the crafts that are traditionally the work of women. MacConnel was one of a few men prominent in P&D, and his Horsey Set—one of the last works in which he paints on cotton sheets—incorporates the bright colors, loosely rendered drawings and unconventional materials central to the movement. In its unpretentious accessibility and straightforward visual appeal, Horsey Set challenges the distinction between "art" and "craft," embodying the spirit and aesthetic of P&D.

Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler’s Stepfather is part of a series in which the artist films the eyes of people watching television. The video tracks the movement of the subject’s pupils, in which the reflection of the television screen is visible. The eye of the video sculpture directly confronts the audience, seeming to engage subject and viewer in a mutual process of looking. Like Oursler’s other works, Stepfather encourages the viewer to consider the psychological consequences of a culture saturated with media images and consumed with the inherently solitary act of watching television.

Nancy Rubins
Nancy Rubins transforms discarded, everyday objects into innovative monumental sculptures. In Pleasure Point, an arc of salvaged vessels projects from the Museum’s La Jolla exterior toward the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Rubins has described her works as drawings in three dimensions; suspending the weathered boats in the air, she gives them graceful, dramatic form.

Andres Serrano
Andres Serrano is a photographer known for selecting highly controversial subject matter. His Piss Christ (1987), a work which depicted a plastic crucifix submerged in urine and whose initial exhibition received public funding, became a touchstone in the debate over public morality as the focus of the "culture wars" of the 1990s turned to art. Ecce Homo, created a year later, likewise depicts a confluence of religious iconography and bodily fluids. Serrano’s photographs raise complex issues about the beauty of images that might be judged distasteful or offensive.

Russell Crotty
Russell Crotty plots the nighttime sky onto paper-covered spheres in his series of globe drawings. Crotty makes astronomical observations from his home in Malibu and records them in the form of maps drawn line by line in ink. Striking in scale, yet painstaking in detail, Cluster in Perseus is one of Crotty’s largest globes to date. By inscribing the stars on the globe, the artist reverses the natural relationship between planet and sky, placing the viewer beyond the stars and enabling renewed attention and contemplation.

Fred Sandback
Fred Sandback’s approach to sculpture emphasizes spaces rather than objects. For over three decades he created sculptures by using a piece of yarn to define a space within the viewing environment. Smaller in scale than many of his other works, Untitled creates the illusion of volume by joining perpendicular walls with a single strand of red yarn. Sandback explored the way in which various shades and arrangements of yarn interact with their surroundings, working in harmony with the space that they identify rather than filling and altering that space as does traditional sculpture.