New collection displays have just opened at Tate Modern and include many works by North and Latin American artists that were recently acquired through the North American Acquisitions Committee, the Latin American Acquisitions Committee, and gifts from donors. Highlights that feature recent TAF Acquisitions include –

LOUISE NEVELSON AND LEONARDO DREW in MATERIALS AND OBJECTS
Natalie Bell Building, Level 4 West
The Materials and Objects display looks at the inventive ways in which artists around the world use diverse materials. Increasingly over the last hundred years, artists have challenged the idea that certain materials are unsuitable for art. Some employ industrial materials and methods, while others adapt craft skills, or put the throwaway products of consumer society to new uses.

Leonardo Drew
In Number 185, 2016 long slats and logs protrude from a central grid, suggesting the force of nature disrupting the constructed world. Drew weathered and painted the wood used in these works to make them appear salvaged and charred. He describes ‘becoming the weather’ in his process of transforming the wood, emphasising our interconnectedness with forces larger than ourselves. Drew numbers his works rather than giving them descriptive titles. This allows viewers to create their own associations with their forms.

INHERITED THREADS in IN THE STUDIO
Natalie Bell Building, Level 2 East
In Inherited Threads, artworks are exhibited which incorporate used textile fragments or reference textile traditions to demonstrate the ways in which cloth holds memory. Textiles often carry personal, cultural and familial meaning. People without access to art studios or a formal art education have employed textiles found in the home as a creative medium.

Gee’s Bend Quilts
The Gee’s Bend quiltmakers are an intergenerational community of African American women living in the isolated hamlet of Boykin (Gee’s Bend), Alabama. Many of the quiltmakers are direct descendants of the enslaved people forced to labor at the cotton plantation established there by Joseph Gee in 1816. Though the Gee’s Bend quilts were originally made by necessity as bedspreads and blankets, the tradition has continued with new generations. In recent years the quilts have been shown in fine art museums and galleries internationally, displayed for their improvisatory compositions and resourceful use of materials. Currently on view are Mary Lee Bendolph (pictured, right), Annie Mae Young, and Aolar Mosely.

Antonio Pichilla Quiacain
Contemporary artist Antonio Pichilla Quiacain explores the cultural significance of textiles in relation to his heritage. He is influenced by the Maya culture of his grandparents, while also reflecting aspects of geometric modernist abstract painting in his woven works. In Kukulkan 2017 (pictured, left), a multi-color fabric appears folded in a zig-zag form, cutting through the area of a canvas with a black-dotted stripe on a bright yellow background. The abstract pattern of these stripes is a quotation to the design of traditional whitecloth trousers with black stripes worn by Maya-Tz`utujil senior men in San Pedro la Laguna, the artists’ birthplace.

These displays will be followed in July by a display of recently acquired photographs by Martha Rosler and two photographic series by Laura Aguilar and Lyle Ashton Harris.

The Tate Americas Foundation is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of five photographs from Dawoud Bey’s series Night Coming Tenderly, Black using funds provided by the North American Acquisitions Committee.

Night Coming Tenderly, Black explores the history of fugitive movement along the Underground Railroad. Taken in the areas surrounding Hudson and Cleveland, Ohio – one of the final stopping points on the historic route – Bey’s photographs depict rural scenes at night. The photographs suggest what the passage to freedom might have looked and felt like from the perspective of nervous and disorientated fugitives, navigating obstacles and fear of ambush against a black night sky.

The Tate Americas Foundation recently acquired Alfredo Jaar September 11, 1973 (Coke) . This work was acquired by the Latin American Acquisitions Committee, further expanding Tate’s holdings of Jaar’s works.

The Tate Americas Foundation received a gift of a major painting by Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), one of the leading figures of abstract American art in the 20th century. Vessel 1961, a spectacular example of the artist’s work created during an important early stage of her career, has been generously donated by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York and marks the first painting by the artist to enter the museum’s collection. It is now on show at Tate Modern alongside four other paintings on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation as part of a year-long free display of the artist’s work.
Vessel was made using Frankenthaler’s signature ‘soak-stain’ technique, whereby she poured thinned oil paint onto raw canvas placed directly on the studio floor. This allowed her to create pools and lines of paint, which she moved with brushes and other tools to produce washes of color. ‘There are no rules’, she said. ‘That is how art is born.’