Recent Acquisition Highlights: Summer 2025

Exhibition Changes Quarterly    

Recent Acquisition Highlights features new acquisitions to provide visitors with a glimpse into the breadth and depth of the Museum’s collection. Exhibitions rotate quarterly.

About the Permanent Collection: The North Dakota Museum of Art’s collection began in the 1980s by collecting individual paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculpture, often drawn from its own exhibitions organized in-house. After nearly fifty years, the collection has grown to over 3,000 works of art. Through donors, strong relationships with artists, and groundbreaking commissioned work the collection continues to grow and thrive.

 Areas of Focus:

• Contemporary regional, national, and international art starting with the early 1970s with the founding of the Museum and onwards.

• The visual history of the region created by local, national, and international artists, including Native American and indigenous artists from North America.

• The Museum collects historical art if appropriate and it supports the exhibition mandate, including twentieth century and Native American. 

Exhibitions curated by the Museum bring important work into the collection, sometimes purchased from the show, through the gallery or artist, and sometimes gifts from artists or collectors. The Museum also commissions artwork that become valuable additions to the collection. Numerous works have entered the collection from private donors helping expand its rich holdings, or with assistance from the Laurel Reuter Directors Fund or the Helgi Ederstrom Fund within the Museum Foundation. As the State Art Museum, it is our mission that this valuable collection be celebrated and shared with all. In addition to frequent collection exhibitions, and the Recent Acquisition Highlights gallery, the Museum has placed works of art in public institutions such as the Altru Hospital and the Grand Forks International Airport, while seeking new and existing organizations to collaborate with.

The Laurel Reuter Directors Fund honors the life and legacy of Founding Director Laurel Reuter, who after 50 years retired in 2022. Following her retirement this fund was established to help purchase new contemporary artworks for the collection, and is available to support other museum components such as artist publications, general operating, and commissions.

About the Artists

Born in 1977 in Brooklyn, New York Nona Faustine was raised in Crown Heights and was drawn to photography at a young age, spending time flipping through family photo albums and exploring books about photographers such as Diane Arbus. She also credited her father and uncle for introducing her to photography stating in an interview “[They] were the ones who put the camera in my hand and introduced me to photography; it was just natural that I had this affinity for the camera and pictures.” She went on to study photography graduating in 1997 from the School of Visual Arts where she learned about black photographers such as Gordon Parks and women artists including Sally Mann. In 2013 she earned her Master’s degree from Bard College’s International Center of Photography. Known in recent years for her powerful self-portraits that celebrate the perseverance of black women, Faustine also produced a body of work that focused on national monuments and the mythologies that sustain them. The work in the Museum’s collection is titled Contested (Teddy Roosevelt Statue, Natural History Museum, New York), 2016 and provides an example of how the artist challenged the idea of monuments by partially obstructing our view of the “contested” figure in the monument. She once described her intent of showing “how history is turned around” and asks “What is left out, what is included, what are the lies. And, who gets celebrated.” In 2019 she and artist Kit White (also featured here), exhibited their works together because their interests in history intertwined believing that in order to understand history one must investigate and interrogate it in order to envision a better future.

The artist recently passed away at the age of 48, shortly after celebrating major career milestones including a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and last year, her first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn.

Michelangelo Lovelace grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. As a young man, he had a brush with the law and a judge warned him of future life consequences. From that point, he made the decision to dedicate himself to art despite the financial and social challenges that faced him. In his twenties, he studied art at Cuyahoga Community College and the Cleveland Institute of Art. It was also at this time that he legally changed his name from Michael to Michelangelo, a nod to the Renaissance master. Unlike his namesake, whose religious artwork was predominately made for the Catholic church, Lovelace focused on the day-to-day lives of the residents and the communities established in his hometown. As the artist explained:

“The paintings I produce are visual documentations of life in Cleveland and many other American inner cities. I continue to explore concerns of cultural, racial discourse, and economic tensions between the haves and have-nots with the overall theme being the community. My paintings depict what it is like living in a community where anything can happen at any time, and where life can often be fast, poor, and short.”

Life on the Boulevard as well as Community show the bustling city blocks viewed from above with its billboards, cars, local businesses, churches, homes, and residents of all ages going about their daily business. Although he received technical training and knowledge of art history, he chose an “intentionally simplified manner” as explained by the organizers of his recent retrospective exhibition at the Akron Art Museum. In this manner, he was able to capture what he describes as “the raw power of life in the inner cities of America.”

Kit White was born in West Viriginia and studied at Harvard University where he received his Bachelors in Fine Art. His work has been the subject of more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in galleries and Museums. He is also a published author of the internationally recognized book 101 Things to Learn in Art School. He is represented by FreedmanArt gallery in New York as was Nona Faustine. 

Born in Baltimore, Marie Johnson-Calloway was raised in a family that valued education. She taught in public school for ten years before completing a degree in art education in 1952. Shortly thereafter, she moved to California to escape segregation. Active in the Civil Rights Movement, she became president of the local NAACP chapter in San Jose and participated in the March in Selma, Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her participation in the March led to her arrest and brief imprisonment. Afterward, her artwork changed direction as she moved away from abstraction to portraying the world around her. As the artist once explained, “I am trying to create images which are intimate reflections of the lives of Black people, images which are deeply rooted in Black dreams, Black suffering, Black pride, Black anger, Black strength and Black love.”

Her mixed-media works were referred to as “sculpted paintings.” Legacy includes a diverse range of materials from buttons, reclaimed wood, hair, scraps of fabric, painted paper, and cowrie shells, the last of which reflect her time in Ghana. More broadly, the shells speak to the widely held African belief in their role as amulets and their protective powers. The shrine-like structure of this piece, in addition to the personal nature of some of the materials (hair, buttons), serves as a tribute or memory to the person that used these materials.

Johnson-Calloway died in 2018 at the age of 98. She has been the subject of several important exhibitions including Homecoming: Marie Johnson Calloway, Past and Present, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2006; and Marie Johnson Calloway: Legacy of Color, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, California, 2015. Her work was included in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2011.