Contemporary Art + Design: New Acquisitions

Contemporary Art + Design presents recently acquired paintings, installations, jewelry, furnishings, and design objects. Featuring artists from 11 countries—including artists based in Texas and emerging painters and designers—the exhibition samples new directions for the growth of the DMA’s collection. The painters’ inventive treatments of organic forms show contemporary approaches to landscapes and still lifes. These forms resonate with the unique shapes of the surrounding design works, from the experimental and functional sculptures by Ron Arad and Misha Kahn to the elegant and whimsical jewelry by Robert Baines, Bruno Martinazzi, Jiro Kamata, and Kiff Slemmons.

Freedman’s Field (1990–1994), by the late artist and longtime Dallas resident Tracy Hicks, is one of the most recent acquisitions featured in the exhibition. Created using artifacts that resurfaced during the construction of the Dallas Arts District, on land that was once part of an African American community founded by formerly enslaved people called Freedman’s Town, the work exemplifies Hicks’s practice of collecting and preserving and is an important reclamation of a demolished past.