The Collection

Check out a sampling of our thematic galleries below, or view highlights of the CMA collection.

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Gallery 5 Theme

Art and Identity

"Gallery 5" Artists often explore characteristics that communicate a person's status, personality, and distinctiveness. Gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and heritage can be constructed or reconstructed through the use of color, form, and technique. These attributes determine and contribute to our self-identification within a complex network of social, political, religious, national, and local groups. In addition to representing the people who populate their visual world, artists have the power to express the maker's sense of self.

Art gives us the opportunity to think about individuals who may or may not be familiar to us. Do these pieces articulate a sense of who we are as individuals, as society, or as a nation?

Mom, Dad, Worlds Apart

This painting depicts a religious ritual: the artist’s mother is seen at her stove in prayer over a Sabbath meal she is preparing. Behind her, a small figure of the artist’s Orthodox Jewish father stands in prayer on the refrigerator. What cannot be seen are the artist’s deeper motives. For Abeles, this painting was a way to express his desire to see his parents together.

Sigmund Abeles

Speak No

Michaela Pilar Brown’s body is a battleground. In Speak No, she uses toy soldiers, rhinestones, and a Kewpie doll to make a powerful statement about the colonialization of white beauty standards on the black female form. Her crossed mouth emphasizes the oft-muted black woman’s voice, and the red color alludes to a kind of gaping wound. The artist is demonstrating the internal battle women of color often experience regarding their beauty and self-worth; she is also declaring victory over her body, reclaiming control of her own form, blackness, and identity.

Michaela Pilar Brown

Portrait of the Misses de Balleroy in a Landscape with a Dog

In the wake of the French Revolution, the opulent court fashions of Marie Antoinette fell out of favor. These aristocratic women are clad in the Empire style, the high-waisted Neoclassical silhouette so in vogue in the Napoleonic era. With the recently developed cultural emphasis on individual liberty and free will, women’s fashion was increasingly becoming not just a way to convey status but a means of self-expression.

Henri-François Riesener

Unidentified Portrait

One of the most important photographers of the 1920s and ’30s, Richard Samuel Roberts documented a time in Columbia’s history when African Americans lived, worked, and worshiped separately from white citizens. This portrait is both a commemoration and a declaration of the will to thrive in spite of oppressive Jim Crow laws and separate-but-equal living.

Richard Samuel Roberts

Gallery 18 Theme

Modern Impulses

Many early 20th-century artists believed that challenging the rigid rules of academic painting was the greatest achievement of Impressionism. The work of Monet and his colleagues suggest that light and color change the permanence of an object right before our eyes. Things in the world, their paintings imply, are not as solid or real as they seem. This attitude was rebellious and modern in its time, and it would have great consequence for the course that art in the Western world would take.

During this same time period, many artists demonstrated an interest in emotion and a preference for subjective interpretation over realistic representation. New types of art including Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism emerged as new materials, new techniques (notably the expressive use of color), and especially new attitudes evolved.

Early modern artists separated themselves from earlier traditionalists, and their work pointed toward and prepared the way for the wildly experimental and often conceptually complicated work of our own time.

The Moon Path

The moon’s path transports or embodies an otherworldly goddess while a classical marble column at water’s edge echoes her luminous figure. Ethereal in subject and shimmering in gesture, this painting fits the ideals of the late 19th-century Symbolist movement that first originated in France and that Daingerfield encountered in Europe. Associated with personal emotions rather than faithful depictions of the material world, Symbolism’s subjects often came from myth, biblical text, and monstrous legends.

Elliott Daingerfield

Man with Scythe

Here we see a man sharpening a scythe, about to begin the day’s work. We know it is early morning—the shadows tell us the sun is low in the sky, just coming up.

To express a feeling of strength, power, and vitality, the artist used broad, slashing brushstrokes. The paint here is thick with colors freely mingled, and though the image is strong and clear, there are actually few details.

William de Leftwich Dodge

By the Windowsill

So realistic does Lucioni’s still life appear that what makes it modern is not immediately apparent. It is his color—exaggerated and unusual, in some places wholly manufactured. Lucioni considered himself a realist, but, like a great many painters, enjoyed the freedom of invention. Modern impulses that had seeped into the American art world gave painters greater freedom to experiment, even those, like Lucioni, who advocated careful, linear drawing.

Luigi Lucioni

Coastal Scene with Buildings

This is a vividly colored, lush painting done in 1915. Now more than 100 years old—painted during the First World War—it is remarkable for how bold the strokes are, how pure the color, how radical the execution. If this painting were to be compared with work going on in Europe at the same time, it would not be likened to Impressionism as much as to Fauvism— the style of the so-called “wild beasts,” the followers of Matisse.

Hamilton Easter Field

Gallery 3 Theme

Spiritual Beings

Like their earthly counterparts, spiritual beings are depicted to show their cultural importance. These images can reinforce faith or serve to spread that faith. Commonly they are objects of devotion, helping people to think spiritually, to pray, or to meditate. Very often, images of spiritual beings are an inspiration to the viewer.

To ensure a god or other spiritual being is recognized, cultural symbols that people are familiar with and understand are often included in these depictions. The biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, is usually shown wearing blue, signifying that she is the queen of heaven. The Buddha is known to his followers through, among other symbols, his hand gestures.

Spiritual beings, like heroes, are most often represented as still, poised, and calm, evoking a sense of harmony and permanence.

Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Annunciate

These two sculptures together tell one story: the Annunciation. This is the New Testament scene in which the Archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary to tell her of her destiny to bear the Christ child. Mary holds her place in a book—Renaissance-era viewers would know she was reading scripture. Gabriel interrupts her, about to announce her divine role.

These figures are carved from wood, a popular medium in the Renaissance for more than one reason. It was inexpensive, readily available, easier to carve than marble, lightweight, and could be painted to enhance a sense of reality.

Tuscan Sculptor

Lōkapala

In Chinese Buddhism, lōkapalas refer to the Four Heavenly Kings, protectors from evil and keepers of
the cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west). These two figures, then, were most likely once part of a set of four.

Unlike the Virgin Mary of Christianity or the bodhisattva of Buddhism, the lōkapala was a spiritual being characterized by fierceness.

Anonymous (Chinese)

Water-Moon Guanyin Bodhisattva

Guanyin is the female bodhisattva of never-ending mercy and sympathy to East Asian Buddhism. A bodhisattva is a mortal who has qualified to enter nirvana. Her full name is Guan Shi Yin, translating roughly as “one who hears the suffering of the world.” She declined entrance into nirvana to remain and help others. To be compassionate is the supreme virtue of Mahayana Buddhism. Her hand gesture here is the Akash mudra, a symbol of nourishment.

Expect the unexpected.