From Exhibition to Collection

Marc Petrovic, Evidence, 2008, hot sculptured glass nautilus shell, horseshoe crab and boat; hand blow glass bottles; and mixed media, 28 x 25 x 6 in, Museum Purchase, 2009.001.

From Exhibition to Collection

May 21, 2016 – September 4, 2016

The summer exhibition in the Museum’s Titelman Gallery focuses on works of art that have entered the museum’s collection after being exhibited in one-person or group shows organized in house. In this thirtieth anniversary years, it is appropriate to take stock of the significant works of art by living artists that have enriched the permanent collection during the past decade. VBMA maintains a long-standing commitment to collecting the work of contemporary, often mid-career, artists. Some well-known American museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, were founded to pursue just this objective, while others, such as the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, began to collect the work of living artists long after they were established. While VBMA has acquired works by early twentieth-century masters such as Willard Metcalf and Leon Kroll, the Museum has just as frequently acquired outstanding contemporary masterworks. A prime example is George Rickey’s monumental kinetic sculpture Annular Eclipse VII, which entered the collection in 2007, after being exhibited in the retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum’s Director/CEO, Lucinda H. Gedeon, shortly after she began her tenure in Vero Beach. Hanneke Beaumont’s Bronze #56, permanently on view in the Beckwith Sculpture Park, was also acquired while being featured in Body Language: The Figure in Sculpture, organized by Jennifer Bailey Forbes in the spring of 2009. These monumental outdoor sculptures will be highlighted via video in the Titelman Gallery. Among the other works of art to be exhibited are Marc Ptrovic’s mixed media sculpture Evidence, which also entered the collection in 2009; Dale Kennington’s painted screen In the Common Interest, donated by the artist in 2014; Marc Sijan’s Gallery Guard, Seated II, acquired in 2012; Stephen Lawson’s panoramic color photograph, Height of Autumn: On North Fork Mountain looking North to Dolly Sods and Spruce Knob, West Virginia, purchased in 2014; and Carol Brown Goldberg’s painting After Avila, gifted to the Museum in 2015. These and other acquisitions of the past decade will provide visitors with a visual experience worthy of celebration.