10 Notable US Museum Acquisitions in 2024
From Cannupa Hanska Luger at the National Gallery of Art to Elizabeth Catlett at The Met, hundreds of works joined institutional collections across the country.
by Isa Farfan 
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Dallas Museum of Art– AMassiveCecily BrownTryptic
British painter Cecily Brown was influenced by the hunting and market scenes of Flemish painter Frans Snyders to create her own slaughter scene in the oil tryptic “The Splendid Table” (2019–20). The work, featuring what appear to be game bird necks and the corpses of rabbits and deer meshed together with abstract strokes on a blood-red table, was gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art by the Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie Family/Labora Collection. “The Splendid Table” is the first Brown painting to be acquired by the Dallas institution, and appears in Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, which is on view now.
National Museum of African American History and Culture– Nat Turner’s Rebellion As Imagined by Christopher Myers
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired a nearly 32-foot-long tapestry by Brooklyn-based artist and writer Christopher Myers that explores the life of Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery in 1831. Filled with lips that appear stitched together, farm tools, red tears, and clashes between white and brown figures, Myers’s quilt is a “portrait of the man caught in the whirlwind of history, in a confluence of ideas and concepts, as are we all,” the artist said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. The acquisition is on view in the museum until June 8, 2025.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art– 300 Prints from Artists in Mexico
In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired 300 prints created between 1890 and 2007 by artists working in Mexico. Among the trove of North American prints is Mexican-American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett’s “Sharecropper” (1952), a linocut of an anonymous woman, printed in green, wearing a broad hat, which was meant to draw attention to the plight of Black women in the South. Catlett and other artists in the acquisition group are associated with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art), a progressive Mexico City art collective founded in 1937 that distributed thousands of prints for leftist causes. Select prints from the collection will go on display in early 2025.
Brooklyn Museum – Autobiographical Leather Carving
Winfred Rembert, who died in 2021, endured seven years of jail time and the horrifying experience of being nearly lynched. When he was released from incarceration, the artist gained acclaim for his leather-carved works, a technique he learned in prison. His wife encouraged him to make art based on his life experiences, and “Looking for Rembert” (2012), acquired by the Brooklyn Museum this year as a 200th-anniversary gift from Trustee Stephanie Ingrassia, depicts a chain gang and reflects on the cruelty of forced labor. The work is the first from the artist to enter the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.
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