The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection

FAIN: CZ-50246-11

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA 02115-5523)
Elliot Bostwick Davis (Project Director: February 2010 to October 2014)

A spend-down fund for acquisitions of American art by artists of color and about people of color.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) requests a $250,000 Challenge Grant in the United States History and Culture program to support The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection, an endowed acquisition fund which provides support for the acquisition of (i) art by American artists of color and/or (ii) art by American artists representing people of color (including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and others) to broaden and enhance the Museum's collection of American art. As a three-to-one challenge grant, and thus a catalyst for community support, this grant will encourage widespread public participation in and support of the MFA's efforts to create a more inclusive collection representative of the many peoples and cultures in our community and in our nation.

Media Coverage

Capoeira, umbanda, samba, frevo…La huella de los esclavos africanos en el arte brasileño (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Helena Celdrán
Publication: 20minutos.es
Date: 1/3/2014
URL: http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/2018919/0/esclavos-africanos/arte-brasil/exposicion/

Gordon Parks “Back to Fort Scott” Opens at MFA Boston (Media Coverage)
Publication: Aperture
Date: 1/13/2015
URL: Gordon Parks “Back to Fort Scott” Opens at MFA Boston

‘Gordon Parks’ shows mid-century America in black and white (Review)
Publication: The Boston Globe
Date: 1/15/2015
URL: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/01/15/gordon-parks-back-fort-scott-shows-mid-century-america-black-and-white/i7z8mGyPSx4Tn3YwVzYYwM/story.html

MFA shows its ‘Samba Spirit’ for the first time (Review)
Publication: The Boston Globe
Date: 1/30/2014
URL: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/01/30/mfa-shows-its-samba-spirit-for-first-time/OrA9L99Uxjhv0Y15v3NEdI/story.html

Loïs Mailou Jones at the MFA (Review)
Publication: The Boston Globe
Date: 1/24/2013
URL: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2013/01/24/review-lois-mailou-jones-retrospective-mfa/uHvcGLNzFJm4Vd40uOkmlK/story.html?event=event12

‘A Long Hungry Look’: Forgotten Gordon Parks Photos Document Segregation (Review)
Publication: The New York Times
Date: 12/24/2014
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/arts/design/gordon-parks-photos-document-segregation.html?_r=0

‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’ at the High Museum of Art and ‘Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott’ at the Museum of Fine Arts (Review)
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: 3/3/2015
URL: http://www.wsj.com/articles/reviews-gordon-parks-segregation-story-at-the-high-museum-of-art-and-gordon-parks-back-to-fort-scott-at-the-museum-of-fine-arts-1425424310

Loïs Mailou Jones: Creating A New African-American Image (Media Coverage)
Publication: WBUR - The Artery
Date: 2/27/2013
URL: http://artery.wbur.org/2013/02/27/lois-mailou-jones

MFA book highlights African American artists (Review)
Publication: The Bay State Banner
Date: 1/21/2015
URL: http://baystatebanner.com/news/2015/jan/21/mfa-book-highlights-african-american-artists/

GONZALO FUENMAYOR SOLO SHOW AT BOSTON FINE ARTS MUSEUM April 18, 2015 – Sep 13, 2015 (Media Coverage)
Publication: The Latin American Art Journal
Date: 4/23/2014
URL: http://www.latinamericanartjournal.com/gonzalo-fuenmayor-at-boston-fine-arts-museum-april-18-2015-september-13-2015/

Associated Products

Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Book)
Title: Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Author: Lowery Stokes Sims
Author: Dennis Carr
Author: Janet L. Comey
Author: Elliot Bostwick Davis
Author: Aiden Faust
Author: Nonie Gadsden
Author: Edmund Barry Gaither
Author: Karen Haas
Author: Erica E. Hirshler
Author: Kelly Hays
Author: Taylor L. Poulin
Author: Karen Quinn
Editor: Lowery Stokes Sims
Abstract: The story of African Americans in the visual arts has closely paralleled their social, political, and economic aspirations over the last four hundred years. From enslaved craftpersons to contemporary painters, printmakers, and sculptors, they have created a wealth of artistic expression that addresses common experiences, such as exclusion from dominant cultural institutions, and confronts questions of identity and community. This generously illustrated volume gathers works by leading figures from the nineteenth century to the present—Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Gordon Parks, Wifredo Lam, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall—alongside many others who deserve to be better known, including artists from the African diaspora in South America and the Caribbean. Arranged thematically and accompanied by authoritative texts that provide historical and interpretive context, this book invites readers to share in a rich outpouring of art that meets shared challenges with individual creative responses.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/common-wealth-art-by-african-americans-in-the-museum-of-fine-arts-boston/oclc/896823321&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: World Cat URL
Secondary URL: http://www.mfa.org/collections/publications/common-wealth
Secondary URL Description: MFA Publications URL
Access Model: Available for sale to the public
Publisher: MFA Publications
Type: Multi-author monograph
ISBN: 9780878468157
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Loïs Mailou Jones (Exhibition)
Title: Loïs Mailou Jones
Curator: Elliot Bostwick Davis
Abstract: “Loïs Mailou Jones” presents 30 paintings and drawings by the distinguished, internationally acclaimed graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Born and raised in Boston, Jones attended the SMFA during high school and earned a scholarship that enabled her to receive her degree in Design with honors in 1927. In 1937, she took a sabbatical from her teaching job at Howard University and spent a year in Paris, where she attended the Académie Julian, frequented museums and galleries, and noted in an interview in the Women’s Art Journal that she was far freer as an African American woman in Paris than she was in the art world in the United States. After her marriage to Haitian graphic artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël in 1953, Jones found inspiration in the spiritual beliefs, sights, and sounds of Haiti. A trip to Africa in 1970 to meet with contemporary artists there brought to fruition Jones’s earlier interest in African art. This exhibition presents works from every stage of Jones’s artistic career, beginning with her early copies after objects in the Museum’s collections, her teaching career at Howard University, and the travels that shaped her distinctive vision and contributions to American art.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/lois-mailou-jones
Primary URL Description: MFA exhibition website

Samba Spirit: Modern Afro Brazilian Art (Exhibition)
Title: Samba Spirit: Modern Afro Brazilian Art
Curator: Karen E. Quinn
Abstract: For the first time the MFA presents a selection of works by 20th-century Brazilian artists of African descent. Rarely studied in the United States, these painters and sculptors drew on indigenous, European, and African traditions, and found inspiration in all aspects of Brazilian life—religious rituals, urban and rural life, music, and dance. Each artist has a distinct approach to subject, style, and iconography creating a lively range of imagery. The exhibition features key works by Heitor dos Prazeres, Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, and Waldemiro de Deus. All are recent acquisitions from the collection of John Axelrod.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/samba-spirit
Primary URL Description: MFA exhibition website

Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott (Exhibition)
Title: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott
Curator: Karen Haas
Abstract: Gordon Parks, one of the most celebrated African American artists of his time, is the subject of this exhibition of groundbreaking photographs of Fort Scott, Kansas—focusing on the realities of life under segregation during the 1940s, but also relating to Parks’s own fascinating life story. In 1948, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) became the first African American photographer to be hired full time by LIFE magazine. One of the rare African American photojournalists in the field, Parks was frequently given magazine assignments involving social issues that his white colleagues were not asked to cover. In 1950, Parks returned to his hometown in Kansas to make a series of photographs meant to accompany an article that he planned to call “Back to Fort Scott.” Fort Scott was the town that he had left more than 20 years earlier, when after his mother died, he found himself—a teenager and the youngest of 15 children—suddenly having to make his own way in the world. He used this assignment to revisit early memories of his birthplace, many involving serious racial discrimination, and to reconnect with childhood friends, all of whom had attended the same all-black grade school as Parks. One of the most visually rich and captivating of all his projects, Parks’s photographs, now owned by The Gordon Parks Foundation, were slated to appear in April 1951, but the photo essay was never published. This exhibition represents a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African American citizens, years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/gordon-parks
Primary URL Description: MFA exhibition website

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Tropical Mythologies (Exhibition)
Title: Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Tropical Mythologies
Curator: Al Miner
Abstract: Fuenmayor’s Colombian heritage and Latino identity collide in works that address Latin America’s colonial past and its legacy. With an elegant flourish, he collages familiar symbols of Latin America with those of Europe, melding bananas and jungle foliage with ornate decorative objects and opulent architecture. His unexpected combinations harness the complex culture clash and enduring tension between the two regions. They also reference “magical realism”—the literary genre marked by a blend of the fantastic and mundane, perhaps best known today through the works of fellow Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges. Fuenmayor earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2004. In 2013, he was awarded the School’s prestigious Traveling Fellowship. He used the funds to visit part of his native country that he had never seen before: Leticia, Colombia’s southern-most city, which sits on the banks of the Amazon River where Colombia, Brazil, and Peru converge. This inspired Fuenmayor to make work on a Colombian banana plantation; his first video art piece, on view in the exhibition, documents that experience.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/gonzalo-fuenmayor
Primary URL Description: MFA exhibition website

Community Breakfast: Celebrate Art by African Americans at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Community Breakfast: Celebrate Art by African Americans at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Abstract: The Community Breakfast enabled participants to learn aboutt recent acquisitions and Museum news, including the release of our new publication, Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The program included remarks by Malcolm Rogers; Karen Haas, Lane Curator of Photographs and curator of Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott; Elliot Bostwick Davis, John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas; and Sylvia Simmons, Gallery Instructor and Honorary Trustee. Citizens Bank spoke about their decade-long support of the MFA's annual free Martin Luther King Jr. Day Open House. This event celebrated the MFA's ongoing community engagement efforts and The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection, and 64 individuals participated.
Author: Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director
Author: Karen Haas, Lane Curator of Photographs
Author: Elliot Bostwick Davis, John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas
Author: Sylvia Simmons, Gallery Instructor and Honorary MFA Trustee
Date: 01/14/2015
Location: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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