Beyond the Basement

Ernest L. Blumenschein, Star Road and White Sun, ca. 1920, oil on canvas, Albuquerque Museum, museum purchase, 1985 General Obligation Bonds, Albuquerque High School Collection gift of classes 1943, 1944, and 1945

Loaning pieces from the collection helps raise the Museum’s renown.

THE LOWER LEVEL OF THE ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM contains over 30,000 art and history objects, carefully catalogued and held in state-of-the-art archival storage units. The Museum’s collections serve as invaluable materials for the Museum’s curators, who constantly research potential exhibitions. The permanent collection isn’t just for the enjoyment and education of Albuquerque Museum visitors. It’s a national—and international—resource. Through networking and the recently launched eMuseum online collections catalogue, curators and scholars from around the country and the world view items in the Albuquerque Museum permanent collection and request to borrow them for scholaraly exhibitions they are developing.

SOUTHWEST TO MIDWEST TO SCANDINAVIA In May 2020, the Milwaukee Art Museum opens the exhibition Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890-1980. Organized by Milwaukee and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this major international exhibition presents the extensive exchange of design ideas between the United States and the Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—between 1890 and 1980. Among the artworks that will travel with the exhibition is an experimental textile work by Alice Kagawa Parrott titled Birdcage. Parrott was a member of the University of New Mexico Art Department where she taught weaving and ceramics. Now her work, which has not been on view recently at the Albuquerque Museum, will be seen in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Oslo before returning to Albuquerque in 2022.

AN AMERICAN TOUR TO ANOTHER WORLD The travelling exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group features approximately 75 works,

Alice Kagawa Parrott, Birdcage, ca. 1968, linen, wool, nylon, wood. Albuquerque Museum purchase, Trustees Acquisition Fund

seven from the Albuquerque Museum collection. Curated by the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, this major exhibition will travel to Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Tulsa, New York, and Sacramento.

The Transcendental Painting

Group, formed in Taos in 1938, transformed the dramatic natural surroundings of the Southwest into luminous reflections of the human spirit. Under the guidance of New Mexico painters Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, artists Agnes Pelton, Lawren Harris, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Pierce, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Dane Rudhyar, Stuart Walker, and Ed Garman issued a manifesto stating their purpose: “To carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.”

“We are extremely pleased to be able to borrow the paintings from the Albuquerque Museum for Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945,” says Scott Shields, Ph.D., associate director and chief curator for the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. “The Albuquerque Museum has excellent holdings by these important artists, who are fast becoming better known on a national level both individually and collectively.”

CHICAGO ON TOUR The Albuquerque Museum also owns a number of works by feminist pioneer Judy Chicago, who lives in Belen. Her textile work, Birth Garment 1: Pregnant Amazon, traveled to the Harwood Museum in Taos, along with its companion, Birth Garment 2: Flowering Shrub, for the Harwood’s Judy Chicago: The Birth Project from New Mexico Collections. In May, another Chicago textile will go to the de Young Museum in San Francisco for its exhibition, Judy Chicago, A Retrospective. The exhibition is organized on the heels of the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s landmark work, The Dinner Party, as well as part of the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote.

RAISING ALBUQUERQUE Lending works to other museums returns multiple benefits to Albuquerque. The objects gain a larger and wider audience and some works that the Albuquerque Museum has lent for traveling exhibitions have been seen by millions of people. Museum curators from around the country visit Albuquerque looking for objects in the collection that might be useful for their projects, connecting the Albuquerque Museum as a potential location for those traveling exhibitions. In the recent past, curators from the Denver Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the National Portrait Gallery have visited. It raises the