The Artist's Party by Joseph Delaney

I was in New York for an annual symposium on American art in the spring of 2003. I went even though the IMA was still contemplating the purchase of a work that I had strongly advocated for the museum’s African American collection. The symposium was important, but so was the purchase, so I kept an open communication with the IMA via cell phone.  The decision to purchase this painting was difficult because Joseph Delaney is not a well known African American artist.

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It’s difficult to acquire a work of art for the IMA that is being offered for sale in an auction, because any addition to the museum’s collection has to be reviewed by a committee and the Board of Directors whose meetings may not coincide with the scheduled auction.  When Loch Long by Robert Duncanson came up for auction in 1997, I knew this would make a wonderful addition to the IMA African American collection. But I had to find a way to bid on the painting but not purchase the work without prior approval from the committee and the Board.  Before I could even consider proceeding, the director’s approval was required. This was not difficult, because building the African American collection was a museum priority and Duncanson was a very important artist and the only African American artist associated with the Hudson River School of landscape painters.  No museum collection of African American art would be complete without one of his landscapes.

Loch Long by Robert Duncanson

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This is the beginning of a series of blogs relating to the IMA’s acquisition of art for its African American collection.  Eight works by African Americans have come into the American Art before 1945 collection since 1993, the first of which has the most unusual story.

I was in the process of organizing the exhibition A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans when I made my first African American acquisition for the museum in 1993.  It was an atypical purchase because the painting, Little Brown Girl by Indiana artist John Wesley Hardrick, had been a gift to the museum in 1929.  At that time the IMA was known as the Herron Art Museum or the John Herron Art Institute.  The policy in those days for lending works from the museum’s collection was very broad and record keeping was not what it is today.  This resulted in the painting being listed as missing in inventory in 1942. Repeated inventories failed to reveal its whereabouts.  The painting remained unaccounted for until 1993 when it was offered to the IMA by a New York dealer because of the artist’s Indianapolis connection.  A discussion with the dealer revealed that the painting belonged to a collector in Maine, but the trail leading back to the Herron Art Museum had gone cold.  The museum’s director went to see the painting and noticed the number 29.40 on the frame, the wooden stretcher and the back of the canvas.  This number confirmed the painting belonged to the IMA, since it was the accession number placed on the work when it was acquired by the museum.  The number indicates that it was the 40th piece of art to be added to the collection in 1929.

Little Brown Girl by John Wesley Hardrick

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