Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

There was a beautiful full page ad that a New York dealer had placed in the magazine American Art Review of a print by William H. Johnson.  Johnson first received attention in 1929 when he won the Harmon Foundation Gold medal.  He was a well trained artist having studied at the art school of the National Academy of Design and then in France, where he took up residence in the former studio of James Abbott McNeill Whistler.  After his return from France, Johnson resided in Harlem and became part of the Harlem Renaissance culture.

Much of Johnson’s art focused on his roots in South Carolina and his life in Harlem.  His work is very colorful and expressive and often tinged with humor.  After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America went to war, Johnson produced numerous paintings and prints that explored the contributions of African Americans to the war effort.  His paintings depicted black soldiers engaged in infantry training, ammunition drills, actual battle, and war-related support services.  He focused on their heroism as well as the segregation of the armed forces with a combination of seriousness and his signature style of humor.

Training for War by William H. Johnson

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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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Have you missed John Sloan’s painting Red Kimono on the Roof?  If you have, you are not alone.  The painting has not been on display for almost a year. Works come and go from gallery walls for a variety of reasons, but often they are on loan to another museum for an exhibition.

The story of the departure of the John Sloan began in July 2006 when the IMA director received a letter from another institution requesting the loan of Red Kimono on the Roof for an exhibition on Sloan’s New York paintings.  The exhibit was scheduled to be shown at four museums from October 2007 through December 2008.  The letter was passed on to me,  the American art curator, and the museum’s registration department setting in motion a carefully documented chain of events that would lead to the departure of the painting. The IMA requires at least six months notice to process the loan of a work of art from its collection.
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Does the war in Iraq make you angry? Sick? Disgusted? Do you want the world to know exactly how you feel? Thornton Dial certainly did. Never heard of Thornton Dial? Well, that is definitely a loss I hope to remedy.

Thornton Dial is an African American artist whose work is in the southern vernacular tradition, which means he is self taught with no formal art education and lives and works in the South (Alabama to be exact.) He makes sculptures and assemblages (wall hangings with things protruding from the surface) using discarded everyday objects that would otherwise wind up in a land fill. So essentially Dial is also an environmentalist. If you look closely at his art, not too closely because there are sharp edges that can leave nasty cuts on delicate skin, you will see mattress coils, paint can lids, old shoes, used clothing, buttons, chicken wire (he is also a chicken farmer), and plastic twine. Almost nothing in the Dial household wound up in the trash. He nails objects to a very large canvas that has been attached to a board, adds enamel spray paint and covers the whole thing in Splash Zone compound, the material used to keep boats water tight.

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