AMHERST, MASS.- The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College announced today that it has received a gift of more than 170 works of contemporary art from an anonymous donor, significantly expanding the Mead’s holdings of recent work. To celebrate this donation, as well as the range of other contemporary artworks that have either been given to or purchased by the Mead in the last several years, the Museum will present the exhibition Starting Something New: Recent Contemporary Art Acquisitions and Gifts, opening September 10, 2019, and running through July 26, 2020.

This gift, which includes works by established artists such as Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, Thomas Ruff, and Cindy Sherman, also includes a significant number of pieces by a diverse roster of emerging and mid-career artists from across the United States and around the world, such as Dario Escobar, Toba Khedoori, Robin Rhode, and Analia Saban. At the same time, the contribution also extends the range of media reflected at the Museum, bringing in new video, photography, and sculptures, as well as paintings, drawings, and a number of mixed-media pieces.

Concurrently this fall, the Mead will open an exhibition marking a decade of acquisitions made through the Trinkett Clark Memorial Student Acquisition Fund. Established in 2008 in honor of Trinkett Clark, former curator of American Art at the Mead, the fund sponsors the purchase of one print selected by Amherst College students each academic year, with the first work having been acquired in 2009. This fund—in conjunction with classes taught at the museum—empowers students to take an active role in the development of the Mead Art Museum collection, and has enriched the diversity of the Museum’s collection. Ten Years of Trinkett Clark Memorial Student Acquisitions also will run September 10 through January 5, 2020.

“We are so incredibly fortunate to be the recipients of a gift of contemporary art of this scale and scope,” said David E. Little, director and chief curator of the Mead Art Museum. “The addition of more than 170 works of contemporary art will have a tremendous impact on our collection, and supports us in our ongoing efforts to expand our holdings in ways that reflect the diversity of the Amherst College community. This goal is advanced further through important new acquisitions of artworks by artists such as Heather Agyepong, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Paul Sepuya, which will be on view this fall. The 10-year anniversary of the Trinkett Clark Memorial fund reminds us of and reaffirms the hands-on student engagement that keeps the Mead a central part of the life of the College.”

Starting Something New: Recent Contemporary Art Acquisitions and Gifts brings together more than 60 artworks made between 1967 and 2019. The works were chosen because they highlight the ways in which artists experiment with different—and often unexpected—media, as well as for the ways in which they explore and reflect on today’s most pressing political issues. For example, Conversations with the Dead (1967-1968), Danny Lyon’s urgently relevant documentary photographs from inside a prison, explore the impact of the prison industrial complex on both inmates and the society as a whole. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Greenbook, Mississippi (2019), a doctored facsimile of a page from Victor H. Green’s “The Negro Motorist Green-book,” demonstrates how artists engage with and integrate complex topics such as race, geography, and culture into their work. And Mona Hatoum’s Rubber Mat (1996), with its grotesque intestines of silicone rubber, serve to comment on the body as a cultural battleground in its own right.